


Doors

by webbo



Category: Stargate - All Series, Stargate SG-1
Genre: Angst, Drama, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Real Life, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-05
Updated: 2017-08-02
Packaged: 2018-09-14 22:25:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 30
Words: 75,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9206312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/webbo/pseuds/webbo
Summary: Sam and Jack, post season 8.She doesn’t know which way to go.  She wants to peek into every door and see the possibilities there but she can't.  In the end, she has to choose one, and so she opens a door and walks through it.





	1. Threads

Cover by XFchemist

beta by Sam-Jack Always

 

CHAPTER 1 - Threads

Jack casts a line while Sam watches.  She’d been fishing before with her dad and the activity is both calming and nostalgic.  It’s only been a week since she’s buried him, only twelve days since she stood over his bed in the infirmary and watched him take his last breath. 

Jack casts his line again. 

Sam thinks it’s a little shitty that this is her first time to the infamous cabin.  It’s not that she doesn’t want to be there, she does, but her imagination had always conjured up more daring, more inappropriate scenarios for her introduction to the cabin.  A team trip after her dad’s sudden death wasn’t one of them.

“Thank you for everything this week, Sir,” she says as she angles her own fishing rod.  “The help with the funeral arrangements, everything,” she holds her fishing pole and thinks about how he’d stood by her through the long line of mourners that made their way to her after the funeral, thinks about how he held her in the hallway after Jacob had died, thinks about his smell and the comfort of his touch.

“Don't mention it, Carter,” he answers her, and she thinks he’s really at peace here, really himself.  He’s sitting back on the rickety chair, holding his fishing pole with one hand and nursing a beer with the other.  She likes this look, likes him relaxed like this, feels like this is a man she could spend a lot more time with. 

The pond water laps against the underside of the dock and they can hear birds in the sky.  For just a moment, their situation is idyllic, perfect.

If only the side door of his house hadn’t revealed that there was another woman in his life.

“I'm surprised Miss Johnson isn’t joining us this weekend.  Really, Sir, you should have brought her.  It's your vacation, I really don't—”

“Carter…”

“I know it's none of my business, Sir,” and she really doesn’t know why she brought it up.  Oh, yes, she does.  She’s a sucker for punishment, and her inner demons want details.

“Mmmm.”

He’s not taking the bait and it’s just proof to Sam that he really is smarter than he lets on.

“So… how long?” she keeps trying.

“How long what?” He steadies his beer and casts the line again, but she sees him grind his teeth.

Sam shakes her head and looks down.  He’s being evasive as ever but it’s like she started it and wants to finish.  She’s still emotional and raw from the funeral, so she’s okay with being pointed and annoying.

“Is it serious?”

“Carter!”  He turns and they stare at each other.  “We aren’t… uh, seeing each other anymore.”

Sam's eyes widen and she looks around.  Jack puts his beer down on the dock.

“Oh.” She wants to say more but she has a fluttering feeling in her belly that she just can’t quite control.

“Yeah.”  He remembers the conversation with Kerry in his office, remembers the awkward day Sam showed up at his backyard at exactly the wrong minute.  He thinks about Kerry in his bed, thinks about how he’d pictured Sam when he made love to the woman and how much of a dick that makes him.  He sighs and Sam thinks his sigh is indicative of heartbreak.

“I'm sorry,” she says, looking out at the pond.

“Sure.” 

“No, really, Jack.  I'm sorry.  I want you to be happy.”

He looks at her and she looks right back.  

“Carter, that’s my line,” he says sincerely, and she nods.  He looks away, starts winding up his line, readying himself to check his bait and cast his line again.  He sees her biting her bottom lip and feels her pulling back, internalizing and shutting down.  He doesn’t want that, not today.

“Are you going to tell me what you came to my house to say?” He watches her and sees the way she tilts her head from side to side, weighing her choices.  “You said you were having second thoughts about the wedding.” He’s an idiot for asking because he knows, _knows_ what it was she came to say.

“Yeah.”

He casts the line again and she decides to recast hers too.  She starts winding up her line, slowly, meticulously.  There’s nothing she does that isn’t measured and controlled.

“You wanna talk about it?”

She shrugs her shoulder and lays it all out as she casts her line into the pond.  “I told Pete… I told him I wanted to call off the wedding.”

 Jack doesn’t say anything, but his eyebrows rise and he looks her way.  He never expected this from her lips.  She looks over and her look on him is steady.

“Yeah,” she admits that she’s a little surprised herself.

“Why?”

She sighs and runs her left hand down her face.  When she looks up at him, he’s still staring at her, waiting for an answer, and her penetrating stare gives him the answer that he seeks.  Her answer is him, has always been.

“Wow,” he says again, and she shifts uncomfortably.   “Why?” He’s beginning to sound like a broken record.

She feels a tug at her line, winds it up a bit, realizes it was a tug at her heart instead.  “Maybe it was my dad, maybe it was seeing you with Kerry.  I don’t know.  I just did.”

There's a long, heavy silence.  The water continues to lap underneath them as the wind picks up.  Jack’s still trying to process that Sam has just told him something to do with the damn room they lock feelings in when Sam speaks again.

“Why did you break up with Kerry?”  Sam asks.  She really wants to know, and she doesn’t think she’ll be able to reproduce the closeness and honesty they’re sharing right now, not later on, not once the guys get back from the store.

He swallows hard and she can tell he’s finding the right way to be evasive, again.

“Carter…”

“No, really,” she pushes.

“I didn't,” he says and she just stares at him oddly.  He looks back at the pond and clarifies, “she broke up with me.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

The water ripples as their bobbles wade up and down.

“What an idiot.”

Jack coughs on his beer, almost choking.  “Carter?”

“Not you.  Her!  She had you and she dumped you?”

“Hey! I did not get dumped! I'm too old to get dumped.”

Carter shakes her head, clearly agitated.

“Bitch,” she mutters under her breath.

Jack grins a bit, then he looks around his pond and wonders if Thor’s just replaced the real Carter with another version.  “Look, I know you're grieving your dad and everything… and it’s endearing that you’re trying to, I don’t know? Protect me?  But name-calling the General's girlfriend? Really?”

She rolls her eyes.  She’s being unprofessional; she feels like she’s finally being herself.  “Why did she do it?”

He shrugs.

She looks at him and her eyebrows lift.

“She said I had issues.”

“What issues?”

Jack looks down at his beer but then looks straight at Sam, his look saying what his lips can’t.

Sam’s eyes grow rounder.  “Seriously?” She looks down and sighs, closes her eyes.  “We're so screwed up.”

“Yeah… tell me about it.”

“For what it's worth.  I'm sorry about it.  I'm sorry it didn’t work out for you.”

“Thank you, Carter.”

They mill the conversation around in their own minds for about a minute, until Jack asks, “What about Pete?”

Sam blows out a noisy breath and rests her head against the back of her chair.  “We're still talking.  He thinks I'm just emotional because of dad and work and everything.  I don’t really know what to think, Sir.”

“Mmm,”

She watches the blue sky and tries to organize her scrambling thoughts.  Jack notices her posture, can see how internally lost she is amid her sea of actual losses.  He feels for her deeply, wants to bind her wounds and make her well but he also knows that she’s the driver of her own fate.

“Tell me, Carter, do you even know what you want?”

“What I want?” she looks his way again and her voice lacks any enthusiasm or confidence in their conversation.  She wants to be talking about anything but this.

“Maybe it’s time you figured it out.”

She looks out into the pond and agrees with him for once.  She rubs a hand against the front of her shirt.  He sees her and at first he doesn’t get what she’s doing, but then he decides that she’s soothing her heart, in any physical way she can.

“Thank you for bringing me here, Sir.  It’s so peaceful.  I can’t believe we didn’t do this years ago.”

If only.

“Yes, well, let's not dwell.”

Their lures bobble in the water and her heart clenches in her chest.


	2. Grace

Two weeks after the trip to the cabin finds the team at O’Malley’s on a Friday night.  The dust seems to have settled a bit and the gate still spins and the sun still rises even though a few heroes are gone for good.  Sam’s had four beers and Jack five, and she’s playing pool with Daniel while Jack sits at the booth with Teal’c.  The big guy still doesn’t talk much and Jack’s fine with that because he has plenty on his mind.  He’s glad Daniel’s back, alive, with full possession of his memories, because Daniel can be a friend to Carter in a way he never could.  His jealousy aside, he knows Sam needs it.

Sam wins another game and Teal’c decides it’s time to drive Daniel home.  When it’s just them they sit at the booth, shoulder to shoulder, for once unconcerned that their bodies are touching.  She drains what’s left of her last beer and eats a few peanuts that are left in the tiny bowl the waitress brought at the beginning of their meal.  She’s had a steak but she still feels hungry.  She doesn’t understand that her kind of hunger has nothing to do with food.  They talk about a few inane subjects, sports, the weather, whether or not they really believe Earth is finally safe, until they go quiet again.  Out of nowhere he asks her a personal question.  He doesn’t know what possesses him.

“Still talking to Pete?”

It should say something to him about how many beers she’s had that the question doesn’t even startle her.

“Yeah.”

He nods and plays with his own empty beer glass.  “Is the wedding back on?”

She shakes her head and purses her lips.  “No.  I’m still… confused.”  Confused is really an understatement, she thinks.  She’s played the “what if” game more times than she’s brushed her teeth over the past weeks, and she’s still trying to understand the repercussions of any situation.

“What exactly are you confused about?” he asks, his voice soft and easy.  It’s the kind of voice that makes her melt, a little.

“My options,” she answers.  She has a sudden desire to retreat and go somewhere quiet to think.  She curses in her mind when the quiet place she comes up with is a dock at a certain cabin.

“Your options?” he turns his body a bit to look at her.  He feels a little like a teenager and he almost wishes time would speed up so he can see the end of this conversation instead of being in it.

“Yes.”  She looks up at him and her eyes narrow and she asks in a too-quiet voice, “Are you an option?”

He frowns but doesn’t lose his eye-lock with her.  He feels suddenly quite hot.  “I feel like you’re trying to pick which pie to have for thanksgiving dessert, Carter.”

She looks away first, focuses on her empty glass and wishes it were full.  “So, you’re not.”

He doesn’t breathe.  “Are you asking if I’m available?  Or if I’m interested?”

She looks back at him.  “Both.”

He nods.  Her eyes roam his face in rapid movements because she doesn’t know if he’s acknowledging her or answering her.  She watches him swallow.  “And I’d have to answer that I’m still your commanding officer.”

She actually rolls her eyes.  Her whole face turns away and she turns her body too, faces the table and places her elbows on it for good measure.  “Mmm, how could I _ever_ forget,” is all she can mutter for his duty-bound statement.  He watches her face turn slightly red and she’s obviously baring her teeth.

“You’re drunk.”

One corner of her mouth lifts annoyedly.  “I’m not drunk.  I’m… pissed.”

“Why?”

She turns to him then, and he sees the vein on her neck is pulsing rapidly. 

“Because…” she takes a breath, “no matter what you still feel for me, no matter what I still feel for you, _and_ no matter how much you may fight for the safety of the damn planet, you’ll never fight that hard to actually be with me.”

She stands, snags her jacket off the other side of the booth and walks out.  He watches her walk through the mostly empty restaurant and is so surprised by her outburst that it takes him a moment to get out of the booth too.  He follows her, furious.  He catches up to her in the parking lot and flings her around a little too roughly.

“You don’t get to yell at me like that and walk off.”

“Fine, have me court martialed…Sir,” she says his honorific with disdain and shrugs his arm off of her.  She tries to walk off again, towards the street where she knows she’ll find a cab.

“No,” he grabs her again, pushes her up against a car.  “You really think I haven’t fought for you? For us to be together?”

“You haven’t,” she all but spits the words out near his face.

“You’re with Pete!  You were about to marry him!”

“I’m thirty-seven! How long am I supposed to wait for you? ‘Till I’m fifty?”

“No!”

“Then forgive me for trying to find some happiness!”

He gets close to her, up to her face.  They’re still in the parking lot, yelling at each other.  “Are you telling me, right now, that if I found a way… that you would want me?”

“Yes.”

He pulls back and looks at her.  He only sees honesty and raw emotion and the answer that came not a second after the question was asked.  He kisses her, right there in the parking lot of O’Malley’s.  It’s their first kiss but to a passerby it looks like a soldier returning to his wife after a long and bloody war.  His mouth devours her, slanted over hers, his tongue as deep as it can go and his hard body pressing hers into the metal of some random car.  She’s active in the kiss and her hand is threaded into his hair in a way that makes him dizzy.  He’s lost in feeling until he feels her move her pelvis up and into his and moan into his mouth.  It’s too much, it shouldn’t be happening, and though he doesn’t want to break the moment, break the taste of beer and Sam, he has to.

He pulls back and she’s breathless and a bit shocked.

He grabs her hand and walks her to the street, hails a cab and puts her in it.  He closes the cab door without another word.  The kiss is exactly what she wants, needs; the being put in a cab is the kind of passivity she’s done with.

sSsSsSsSs

The next morning, he’s at her front door at 9 am.  She hasn’t showered yet and her hair is sticking up in a few places.  When she opens her front door, she’s holding a cup of coffee and he stares first at her, then at her cup.  She thinks maybe he hasn’t had one yet.

“Coffee?” she says and opens the door further.  He wants some but he wants her more and he thinks she’s lost a little of the angry edge she was wearing the night before and that bodes well for him.  He steps inside her door and thinks he really does like the tousled look.

She makes him a cup and brings it over to the living room where he’s sat down on one of her couches.  He feels like maybe she was expecting him.

“I owe you a huge apology, Carter,” he begins when she puts the cup down in front of him.

“For what, Sir? Kissing me in a dark parking lot? Or the other thing?” she sits down near him.

“What’s the other thing?”

She actually glares at him.

“Carter, how was I supposed to know you wanted something to happen? You started dating… you got engaged…”

She shakes her head and he’s aware that she’s holding back words.

“I’m not here as your General.”

Her eyes snap up to his.  “That’s what you don’t get.  You’re _always_ my General.  We can’t even talk about this,” she answers.

“It sounds like we have to!”

She looks down and bites hard on her lip, closing her eyes.  Her next words are almost a whisper.

“You shut me out.”

He sighs.  “When?”

“We had a great year… a good relationship, the year Daniel was gone.  When he came back… things started to change.”

“It wasn’t Daniel that made things change.”

She looks at him and raises her eyebrows, inviting his answer.

“It was Pete.”

“No,” she shakes her head immediately, “it was _before_ Pete, _way_ before Pete.”

He sighs because he knows she’s right.  He scratches at a patch on his head that doesn’t really itch.

“Things were getting to be too much for me… with you,” he confesses.

She looks around, looks at him.  “What does that mean?”

“It means I wanted you… the lunches, the missions, the seeing you every minute of the day and not having you… I’m only human, Carter!”

Her mouth falls open and she’s speechless, for once.  They’re talking about something they never talk about and she doesn’t know how to respond.  Her coffee maker beeps, a long beep that signals it’s turning off and it breaks the moment a bit for her.

“So… you went cold on me.”

“I’m sorry,” he says sincerely.

She answers him with a small nod.  Her hands and arms seem to go limp because she understands him completely, knows the inner angst and pain of not having him, shares in his feelings more than she could ever reveal to him.  She feels totally without direction, can’t quite seem to concentrate or know what it is she should say to him.

She looks at him and sees that he looks a little lost too.  He’s drinking the coffee she made for him and looking down at her carpet.

“I had a hallucination,” she says and she watches him look up at her, his face confused.  He might even think she’s a little crazy.  “When the Prometheus was stuck in the nebula,” she clarifies.

“Ah, you had a concussion, Carter.”

“I know.  But I had a hallucination.” She says it to him again and he gets that she’s not crazy, that whatever she’s about to tell him is important.  “Dad told me something, and then you told me something…  about being happy, that as long as I kept you as an ideal, as long as I kept my sights on something I couldn’t have, that it was blocking me from… keeping me from actually finding happiness.”

He takes in her words and wonders why the hallucination of him didn’t just kiss her silly.

“So… Pete.”

“Yeah.”

Jack puffs out all the air left in his lungs.  He gets up and walks around her living room, nervous energy suddenly filling his body.

“And where are you now?  What you said last night, is it actually true? Or were you just drunk?”

“I wasn’t as drunk as you think I was,” she says, her voice flat. 

“I wasn’t drunk at all,” he says, and she knows then that everything he said was truth, the kiss and the passion and the anger too.

She stands also.  “You said last night that you had tried.”

He turns and looks at her from across her house and nods.

“How exactly have you tried?”

He shoves his hands in his pockets and looks down.

She sits again and takes her coffee cup, downs two, three big gulps of the hot liquid.

It’s his turn now to bring up her words.  “You said last night that If I found a way…” she hears him say but cuts him off.

“What makes you think you’d be successful this time?”

He sits across from her and sips his coffee too.  “I’m older.”

“They’ll never let you retire, Jack.  You have to know that.” The way she says his name makes him want to put her in his truck and run away with her, the Air Force be damned.

“I’m here this morning to confirm whether or not I should try.”

“Based on this conversation?”

“Hell, Carter…”

“You can’t even call me by my first name!”

He wants to tell her that he calls her by her first name almost every damn night, but he can’t.   He just looks at her and transmits the thought with his eyes.

“And what about Pete?”

“What about him?” she says that in such a way he wonders if she loves the guy at all.

He challenges her with his eyes.

“Pete and I are on hold for now.  He knows I’m confused.”

“But you love him.”

She swallows, looks lost.  “Look, I know you don’t care for him, but he… could give me a life.  Please don’t judge me for trying to find some semblance of normalcy.”

“If you want normalcy, you should pick him now and we end this.”

“Just like that? Easy?”

“I didn’t say it’d be easy.”

She stops and grabs her head, closing her eyes.  It’s ironic to her that she’s the one saying his lines when the conversation is real.  She thinks about the kiss last night, the way his tongue felt against the inside of her mouth and how Pete had never gotten her so wet in just mere seconds.  Not ever.

She opens her eyes. 

“Try.”

He leaves through her front door and she takes a shower that is long.


	3. There is Nothing

He spends a week feeling through his options until finally he confesses to Hammond what it is he really wants: Samantha Carter.  Hammond knows, has known for a while, but even he cannot control the powers that be and Hammond has news of his own, plans of his own that include Jack becoming the next big wig of Washington D.C.  There’s a way, but he doesn’t like it and he doesn’t think Sam will like it any more than he does. 

Two more Saturdays roll by and a few more missions that are so shitty they have Sam on edge.  Her team comes back from four days on a sandy, overheated planet and they’re ordered two days downtime in the middle of a workweek.  Still, he finds the time to pop off base during lunch, and the way he’s idling his truck in front of her house has everything to do with how apprehensive he is about how she’s going to take his news.  He finally sees her come out her front door in shorts and a t-shirt, and crosses her arms as she leans her body on her door frame.  Her look tells him she’s noticed his presence for the past twenty minutes and it’s starting to freak her out.  He turns the car off and makes his way to her, his plan and his heart in his throat.

She walks in without a word and holds the door open for him.  When he walks through, he takes a deep breath and somehow she picks up that the news is probably not good.  He’s seen her in shorts before but never since knowing what she tastes like after a few beers.  It throws him off, big time.

“They won’t let you retire, will they?” she says before they’re properly seated, interrupting his thoughts.

He sits anyway and waits until she does too. 

“No, Carter, they won’t.”  He watches her swallow, close her eyes.  When she opens them again, he sees the emotions steeling, her composure full and projecting acceptance even as he catches a glimpse of shimmer in her left eye.

“Well,” she stands, “it was worth a try.”

“There’s more.”

“More than nothing?”

He just looks up and she sits back down.

“Hammond is retiring.”

She nods.  “That’s a long time coming, I think he’s been planning it for…” she pauses and watches his face.  “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“You’ll have to replace Hammond,” she declares looking down. 

“Yeah,” it seems to be all he can say at the moment.

“Homeworld Command,” she confirms, “in Washington D.C.”

He shifts on her couch and holds both his hands in between his legs.

“Congratulations, Sir.”

“Sam, I don’t want it!  I told him I was ready to retire now!”

She laughs humorlessly.  He’s finally managed to call her Sam but she knows he still doesn’t get it.  “You’re too important.”

There is a beat of silence and Sam and Jack are both thinking, processing.

“I need you to know that… after I was denied retirement, I asked specifically for… what I wanted.”

She looks confused, but only for a moment, until her eyes widen.

“Hammond checked, and conferred with the President—”

She stands, interrupting him.  “Oh, god!  Really?  The President knows now?”

“Please let me finish,” he stands too, looking straight at her.

“He said that—”

“’He,’ the President?”

“Yes, the President said he cannot allow it, Hammond agrees.”

“Of course they can’t allow it!”

“They think that even with moving the chain of command around a bit, that it’s too much of a conflict of interest.  I’d be making all command decisions for Stargate related—”

“And I’m only valuable for Stargate related work now,” she interrupts him.  “Right?”

He nods.  “But… but he said he’d turn a blind eye… pretend they don’t know.  Hammond agreed it would be the only way.”

She stands there, stunned.  Her lips purse and inside her mouth she begins to grind her teeth.

“This is your plan?”

He feels like he’s been slapped in the face.  It’s one thing thinking she won’t like the plan, but it’s another thing to see her displeasure and know that it truly is the only option.  He’s a little angry too, because although he’s not bringing her a pleasant platter of beautiful options, he did put himself out there in his highest effort yet to pursue her.  He sees immediately that she just doesn’t take it that way.  His pride is wounded that she doesn’t recognize what it took for him personally even to try.  There is nothing Jack can do but bow out, with grace.

“I’m sorry.”

“We’d have to sneak around, hide it,” she’s processing out loud and Jack realizes she’s not immediately closing the door.

“Yes.”

“We’d get caught.  They may turn a blind eye but what about the organizations out there keeping tabs on us and chomping at the bits to get their hands on the Stargate…”

“I know, Carter.”

“So, you agree, it’s insane.”

He nods.  “I think it’s insane for more reasons than that, actually.”

“Oh?”  Her face crumbles a little, but she’s still trying to keep a façade of total composure.

“You deserve the things I know you want… the normalcy, the marriage and a family and a life.  None of that can happen in the shadows.  And none of that can happen when you’re in Colorado and I’m in D.C.”

She takes her right hand and covers her mouth with it.  One of the doors is shutting faster than she can control.

“When is this happening?” She means Hammond’s retirement and his move to D.C. and he seems to understand.

“The paperwork’s already in motion… it won’t be long now.”

She sits on her couch and looks at nothing.

“So, if I don’t choose a secret affair, I’ll never see you.”

“I’ll always be here for you, you know that.”

She huffs and the door closes on his way out.

sSsSsSsSs

A week passes and Sam’s still unsure.  The news has gone public that Jack’s being promoted and taking Hammond’s job in D.C. and everyone seems apathetic at best.  Daniel doesn’t understand why Jack’s life can be controlled by a military organization, and Jack can’t seem to put into words what duty means to a person like him.  Sam is mute about the subject, congratulates him in public and then hides in her lab.  She needs a break, needs some coffee, so she walks over to Daniel’s lab hoping to convince him and Teal’c to walk over to the cafeteria with her.  When she approaches his office, she hears voices, knows who’s in there, and she makes sure the hallway is clear of bystanders before she pauses to hear what they are saying.

“We’ve talked about it, just… relax, Daniel,” Jack’s voice saying to Daniel.

“I don’t understand why you guys aren’t together,” Daniel says, “You two should be together.”

Sam flattens herself against the wall and concentrates to hear more, hear everything.

“It's complicated, Space-monkey.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Jack…”

“Daniel…”

Sam feels the weight of their conversation, wishes she could see their faces too.

“Daniel, she wants more than I can give her.  She's young.  She wants a family and kids and everything that goes with that.”

Sam’s eyes widen.  He’s right and she wonders how she’s so obvious.

“She told you she wants kids?”

“Not in so many words…”

“Jack…”

“Daniel!  I'm old.  I have a lot of baggage and I haven’t exactly been fantastic at relationships over the past ten years.  Look at me.  Carter deserves better.  I can't give her what she needs.  Trust me.”

Outside of the door, Sam closes her eyes.

“But you care for her,” Daniel says.

She sees someone coming down the hallway and decides that this whole thing isn’t worth a cup of coffee.  She takes off in the opposite direction and buries herself in work, tries not to think about how the doors are slowly closing around her, the options thinning as the days pass.

The next day, she leaves the mountain at a decent hour, grocery shops and then stops by the Italian deli for her favorite pizza.  They have a stone oven and pizzas with more toppings than just pepperoni, and she finds she can call it a healthy meal when all is said and done.  She called at the grocery store and ordered, so now she parks her car in the Carry Out spot and texts the number on the plaque in front of her.  When she’s waiting for her pizza to be delivered to her car, she looks into the restaurant, through the glass windows right in front of her.  She freezes and starts to slink her body down the car seat. 

Jack O’Neill is sitting inside, eating a slice a pizza, pepperoni, by the looks of it, and he’s not alone.  Kerry Johnson is next to him, sipping a coke and laughing.  He leans over and says something to her and she laughs again, reaches over him and snatches a napkin off the table. 

She’s startled when a boy in a blue baseball cap taps on her window and he’s holding her pizza and her bill.  She lowers the window, takes the pizza and hands him a crisp twenty.  She doesn’t wait for her change when she backs her car out and leaves.  Her heart is beating at the speed of a fast drum, and it feels broken, lost.  She’s not surprised when outside, it starts storming.

Later that night she shows up at Pete’s house.  He’s overjoyed to see her and hugs her, holds her until she breathes out all of her stress.  This is what she needs, comfort, not just now but always, every day, every minute.  He promises to love her, says he doesn’t even care if they ever get married, that they can just be together, love each other, live together.  She tells him she’s sorry, and when they make love, Sam doesn’t imagine that it’s Jack.


	4. Dust

She chooses to go to Area 51 for more reasons than she reveals to the world.  Sure, Cassie needs some emotional support, but Sam needs it in almost equal amount.  She’s there because she needs a break, from her life of endless risk and personal sacrifice and from the men that have a hold of her heart.  She leaves Pete in limbo, saying she has to find her own way, saying she’ll let him know what her future will be and if he’ll be in it soon enough.  Sam goes to Area 51 and tries to find herself. 

Daniel stays at the SGC, gets in a load of trouble accidentally introducing Earth to a new enemy that makes the Goa’uld look like pet snakes.  She feels more confident knowing that Teal’c is with him, and Jack’s made sure to add a competent military commander.  Sam likes Cam and she doesn’t even care that he’s been easily handed command of the team, her team, as if it belonged to him all along.  She’s the one that chose to leave, to move to a desert and hyper-analyze her life and her choices.  She doesn’t know which way to go.  She wants to peek into every door and see the possibilities there but she can't.

She spends a lot of time at work, which doesn’t surprise her, but she is shocked by the amount of time she spends sleeping.  She feels like she hasn’t slept in eight years, and she catches up surprisingly well.  She visits with Cassie once every weekend, a meal or a day out or a phone call at the very least.  She learns everything about Area 51, its projects, its past discoveries.  She drives to the Grand Canyon on Saturday, by herself, and sits by one of the canyons until the sun sets and the rangers come out and make people leave.  She thinks about her life, thinks about what she wants, thinks about Pete and his plans and his house.  She thinks about Jack too, about the kiss in the parking lot and the attraction and sexual tension that follows them everywhere.  She thinks about his move to D.C., picks his own choices apart and wonders if he’s moving there for Kerry, so they can continue whatever it is they have. 

She sees a family packing up their truck at the Canyon.  There’s a pair of little girls bouncing around the dust and they play, unconcerned with the end of the world, with the Ori, with the darkness, and they play as their parents speak tenderly to each other.  They finish packing the car and hold hands, leaning against their car and watching their children outlined by the setting sun.  Her heart constricts when she sees the guy lean in and kiss his wife, it tightens further when he walks over, takes the little girls each by their hands and walks them back, buckles them in their car seats.  She wants that, wants a family, wants the kisses and the hand holding and the little girls that one day might play in the dust.

In the desert of Nevada, she discovers that she does love Jack, that maybe she always will, but that she wants more, wants a family, wants to lean against a car and be kissed in public, wants uncomplicated wholeness.

There are different doors she could walk through, but she feels like she has no real choice.  In the end, she has to choose one, and so she opens a door and walks through it.

When Sam gets recalled to SG1, she marries Pete a month later.  They move into a house Sam insists on picking out with him, and they work on a new plan together.  She doesn’t want a dog and he’s okay with that.  He stops asking her about work and she starts coming home for dinner every night.  Sam has a child almost immediately; they call her Jenny.

Jack disappears into the bowels of duty and he and Sam don’t speak for a full year.


	5. Line in the Sand

Sam’s in the infirmary typing when Cam comes in offering macaroons.  She’s quick to close the laptop and tell him that she’s feeling better and should be back in action in a few short weeks.  He force-feeds her a macaroon and then leaves her again.  She’s eternally grateful for Cam, he saved her life on the planet, but she’s glad of the quiet again.  Pete’s allowed to see her and brings in Jenny for a quick cuddle each morning, but Sam hates having her around the gate and wants her whisked from the base as soon as they’re done.  The doctor that comes in to check her skin grafts is releasing her in two days, so she wants to get a few things settled before then. 

They had finally allowed her a laptop, and after sleeping and recovering for days, she can’t seem to put it down.  She smiles when she thinks about the nurse who brought it in, a red bow stuck to it and a white note attached.  She puts the bag of macaroons to the side and opens her laptop back up, lifts it and retrieves the small white envelope sandwiched between the computer and her thighs.  She’s read the note eight times so she doesn’t have to open it again, but she holds it and for some sentimental reason it brings her strength.  After a minute, she puts it back down, under the laptop, and rereads what she was writing, finishes her thoughts in the email that she’s typing:

_mailto: Jonathanjoneill@usaf.gov_

_subj: thank you_

_Sir,_

_It’s been… a long while and I hope you are well.  Thank you for your thoughtful gift – you’re the only person in the world who thought to send me exactly what I wanted (and needed) the most.  There are flowers wilting around me, but the computer in my lap is bringing me more joy than you can imagine.  Actually, I suspect you can imagine that too._

_It was a bad mission, the worse one I remember in a long time.  The device worked, and then it didn’t, and I feel like I’ve failed my team and my command in so many ways.  The displacement field collapsed, the fighters arrived, and I know you’ve never been shot by this particular kind of staff blast before – let me tell you – the pain is worse than anything we’ve felt before.  I’m mostly embarrassed that I got shot.  You taught me well, how to perceive a threat and mind my bearings while I work.  This soldier came out of nowhere, and I was focusing on making the device work.  Sir…I barely had time to duck.  Cam tried… he tried to save me, to make the device work again.  I remember knowing that I was going to die.  I almost died, Jack._

_I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, it probably has a lot to do with how much morphine I’ve had in the past week.  The skin grafts are complete and I can just imagine how unattractive I’ll look in a swimsuit now… my stomach and back patched up like a quilt.  Honestly, I’m mostly just grateful to be alive.  I thought about a lot of things while I was there, while I was dying.  I wish a lot of things were different and sometimes I wish I had gone through a different door.  I sometimes long for the good old days, the four of us walking through the gate to go fight some gold-cladded snakes.  Daniel is still missing, gone.  I wonder if he’s actually dead for real this time.  Teal’c says that we’re definitely not packing up his apartment, that he’s done that too many times only to have to help Daniel unpack it when he’s back.  I hope he’s back soon.  The walls keep caving in around here and every day I feel like I lose another bit of the life I loved._

_Take care, Sir, and thank you again for your note._

_Sam_

_Lt. Col. Samantha Carter_

 

Sam hits send on the email before she can talk herself out of it.  It’s been over a year since she’s talked to him, she’s married and has a child now, and she wonders if the silence that she’s kept towards him should permanently end.  This email was a big step, she knows his handwritten note was for him.  She’s avoided the base or coordinated her missions and leave time for dates when he was in for official business.  She’s had to go to Washington, to the Pentagon, but she didn’t see him and she wonders if he played the same game she did, took a sick day during her one day on his turf.  She misses him, can’t believe the feelings reading his short, handwritten words evoked, and she wonders about his life, wonders if he’s still attached, wonders if he’s happy.  It should say something to her that the current password to the most personal file in her computer has more to do with Jack O’Neill than her own husband. 

The next morning when she powers on her laptop, there’s an email waiting for her too.  Her heart speeds up until she clicks on it and it opens.  She closes her eyes briefly and then steels herself, opens them and reads:

_mailto: samanthacarter@usaf.gov_

_subj: re: thank you_

_Sam,_

_Don’t mention it._

_Oh, also… get it out of that genius brain of yours that you failed anything on this mission.  My only hope is that you did not suffer long.  It pains me to know you anticipated death.  I have a feeling Daniel’s alive.   I know you trust my gut instinct, so hang it there._

_Tell the doc to give you as much morphine as you want :)_

_Jack_

_p.s. my door is always open, and my phone is always on._

_p.p.s. I have a skin graft collection.  They heal way better than you’d expect… don’t worry._

She isn’t surprised she’s smiling when she finishes reading his words; she remembers that she does trust his gut instincts.  She wants to email him back and tell him that she deserves his anger and not this kindness, that she needs him back in her life, desperately.  Her phone beside her buzzes, and when she flips it open it’s a text message from Pete saying Jenny has just crawled for the first time. 

“Damn,” Sam says to the empty infirmary space she’s occupying.  She’s missing a lot of her infant’s life and she realizes she almost died, leaving Jenny to be raised solely by Pete.  She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes.  This was the choice she made and these are the compromises she made peace with in her mind about.  Her job has risks, her work has unmeasurable importance to the safety of Earth.  In the long-run, she is saving Jenny from a too-short life under the rule of power-hungry, egotistical aliens bent on enslavement and religious domination.  She loves Jenny, finds that nothing can give her the satisfying, all-encompassing contentment that she gets from taking her child in her arms and rocking her slowly back and forth.  Jenny can’t communicate yet but Sam doesn’t care.  She loves her even if she never communicates back.  She loves her just for existing. 

She thinks that her choice to marry Pete was worth it just for Jenny alone.  Sure, Pete’s there and he keeps her company, sometimes.  But Jenny is more.  She validates Sam as a woman.  Even in the world they live in, modern and understanding, she still finds that bearing a child has brought her up a level in society.  She’s always been a bad-ass, intelligent warrior.  But now she’s more.  Now she’s a mother.  People recognize that and Sam likes the extra pin on her lapel.  She’s worth more because she has more.

She closes the phone back up and lays her head back on the pillow.

She went for the door that was wide open and now she has the things that she wants in life, the things that seem to complete the puzzle.  But, sometimes she wants even more.

Sometimes, she still wants _him_.


	6. The Shroud

As it turns out, Teal’c is right because Daniel shows up alive on a planet where SG1 just happens to be on a mission.  The only problem is, in Jack’s wording, he’s been “Orified.”  Jack comes to town because he’s needed to help determine whether or not Daniel is speaking the truth… whether or not Daniel is an actual prior or if he’s just faking that he’s faking to the Ori and not them.  Jack’s confused by the whole thing but loves being back in it, back in action, back with the team. 

Sam sees him for the first time when she walks into the briefing room and he’s sitting with her familiar group of people.  She hasn’t talked or emailed him since their brief online reacquaintance during her convalescence and they haven’t actually seen each other in person since the day she said goodbye to him at his going away party, nearly two years ago.  She notices first that he has two stars on his uniform, and that when he talks to the room full of people, yells his opinion, that he sounds a little whiny, like an old man.  His hair is whiter, and he’s gained a few pounds.  She’s wondering if the spark and attraction she’s always felt for him has finally passed until he meets her gaze and then she feels, _knows_ that no number of years will ever disconnect the two of them from sharing in the needy, addicting chemistry and suffocating angst of wanting each other. 

Later on, they stand side by side in her lab and then his voice is different, not like a raucous old man but soft, like the man she knows, misses.  It’s crazy to her that his scent can still make her head spin.  Nonchalantly, he asks her how her kid is, how her life is.  She looks him in the eyes and tells him that it’s okay, that her kid is the best thing that ever happened to her.  She feels sad when he smiles because she knows that while he’s glad for her, he still must miss Charlie, must miss having his own kid.  He asks her if she’s got a picture, and Sam looks around but she knows her office is devoid of any family life.  She shakes her head and explains that if an enemy were to ever invade the SGC, she’d prefer them not having proof positive that she is in any way attached.  He gets it, wishes she wasn’t in any way attached either.

In the end, they arm a fancy weapon, beam the team and Daniel off the Ori ship and send it through the Supergate.  Daniel’s back, looking normal again, and Jack asks Carter repeatedly how it is that he could have looked like a prior one minute and then back to normal Daniel the other.  She doesn’t really have a satisfying answer and so they both shrug and are just grateful to have him back.  Sam hugs Daniel and then punches him in the arm, ordering him to stop disappearing and dying on them, that’s it’s getting old and she doesn’t have the emotional stability to deal with it anymore.  Jack overhears her and he wants to ask her about it but he doesn’t have the opportunity, not yet, because he’s still the senior-most decision maker in the group and he has orders to give.  They’ve pretty much killed the Ori but not their followers.  The war still looms and the door to their galaxy is still wide open.

That night, the team doesn’t get together like old times and Jack corners Daniel about it while he drives the man home on his way to his own hotel. 

“What do you mean you guys don’t do it anymore?  How does the team stay a team?”

“It’s not that we don’t hang out, we do!  Just… rarely on evenings anymore.  Sam has Pete and the baby, and she runs home pretty much as soon as our boots are back through the gate.  Hanging out at O’Malley’s and watching Star Wars over and over again while we eat insane amounts of pizza is something SG1 did with _you_.  It’s different now that we have Cam and Vala.  We hang out now in different ways…”

“Like what?”

“Well, Teal’c, Vala, Cam and I often still have dinner, but it’s on the base most of the time and not as… involved as it was before.  We’re just all a bit… busy.  I think Vala and Sam go shopping… do girlie things.  We sometimes try to get together on Saturdays so that Sam can participate too, with the baby.”

“And Pete?”

“Nope.  We always do stuff when he’s working.”

“Ah…”

“He’s not really big on Sam’s work.. the team… you knew that already.”

“Right.”  They’ve arrived at Daniel’s house and the only reason Jack doesn’t offer to come inside is because Daniel looks like he’s about to sleep for the next 36 hours.  “Get some sleep, you deserve it,” he says.

“Take care of yourself, Jack,” Daniel waves as he walks up his path and disappears into his house.

Jack drives to O’Malley’s and has dinner by himself.  It doesn’t even phase him, the eating alone bit, because he does it often in D.C. when he can get away from the stuffy atmosphere and his workplace companions.  He only has one beer and orders a leaner cut of steak with a baked potato.  He’s indeed older and he’s noticed he has to eat a bit less in order to maintain his shape.  He doesn’t talk to a single person besides the bartender, and he feels a little sad, a little lonely, a little thrown away in a town that was supposed to be home. 

He drives to his hotel and considers calling to see if there’s a red eye he can catch so that he can be back in D.C. by morning, but changes his mind when he sits down on the bed and feels how tired he really is.  Sleeping on a chair in a bumpy aircraft isn’t going to cut it and the hotel bed looks rather inviting.  He thinks about how long it’s been since he’s had sex and regrets not having looked around at O’Malley’s to see if there were any available women who might be trying to catch his eye.  He’s done that twice in the past few years and he’s not opposed to the idea every once in a while.  But then he remembers the disappointment of not only the sexual experience but of his inability to be emotionally available to a woman, any woman, these days.  He sighs and considers taking a shower, taking care of himself… business as usual.

He’s about to get up and get in the shower when he feels his phone beep in his pants pocket.  He fishes it out and sees a text.  It’s from Sam.  He blinks and focuses on the phone screen again.  She hasn’t texted him in years and he’s unsure if maybe it’s a mistake.  He uses the little arrows to select the message and open it.

_“It was nice having you on the team again, Sir.  Thank you for helping get Daniel back.  Safe journey home.”_

His chest constricts when he thinks about the woman who is suddenly texting him.  He didn’t know what would happen, if anything at all would happen, when he sent that note to the SGC and ordered that Carter be given access to her work laptop.  The news had come that Carter had been shot by an Ori weapon and in critical condition while he was in the middle of a briefing with the newly elected Governor of Colorado.  The new guy had to be briefed about the sensitive nature of the work done at Cheyenne Mountain Complex and delicately told that at any point in time, the complex could implode.  The self-destruct was armed often enough these days that the new administration deemed the briefings important.  Jack couldn’t give a damn.  He’d escaped the meeting, taken two aspirin and called Cassie.  It was one thing to lose Carter to another guy;  It was an entirely different thing to lose Carter to death.

And then she’d pulled through and emailed him.  He’s still not exactly sure that she meant to, that she wasn’t entirely doped up when it happened, but now here she is texting him again.  When she picked Pete and ended their communications, Jack thought that’d be the end of it, the end of ever talking to her again.  He’d been angry and heartbroken over her life choice, vowed to stop loving her, stop thinking of her, stop feeling at all.  He’d even avoided her when she came to D.C., just like a love-sick teenager, discarded right before the senior prom.  He’d heard she had a child, probably conceived on her honeymoon, and he was genuinely happy that she finally got everything that she wanted, even if it did kill him a little on the inside.  He was happy for her because no matter how betrayed he felt, he still wished for her happiness, wished for her success, his own personal hell be damned.   

He wonders if he should respond and what that response should be.  He finally settles on something snarky and hits send.  He hasn’t changed all that much, really.

" _I can’t believe you guys let team nights die.”_

He waits a minute and receives a reply.  _“The guys didn’t take you out?”_

_“Some nonsense about being exhausted.  I still found a steak, don’t worry, Carter.”_

The reply comes almost immediately this time.  _“I’m sorry, Sir.  I stopped going but I still thought they did.”_

He figures the conversation is going to end there but then he gets another beep.  _“Where exactly did you find a good steak?”_

He wants to pretend like he never got that last message but then at the same time he is Jack O’Neill and he does in fact want to open that can of worms.  O’Malley’s holds a lot of history to them; the parking lot alone threatened his blood pressure significantly when he arrived.

_“O’Malley’s,”_ he types back.

_“Alone?”_

He doesn’t exactly know what he wants to say.  _“Don’t worry about it, Carter.  The food was good, as always.”_

He holds his breath when the next thing she says is, _“Are you still there?”_

He considers lying and saying that he is, just to see if she offers to join him.  _“No,”_ he texts instead, _“back at the hotel now.”_

_“Okay,”_ she texts.  _“Have a good night, Sir.”_

He sighs and wants to kick himself.  He’s not done talking to her, at the very least he’s not ready wanting to.  _“Hey, you okay?”_ He hits send before he can think better of it.

Her reply takes way longer than the others; it’s enough of a delay to make his anxiety levels rise.  He’s not one of these young people that is particularly good at the texting thing.  He’s not slow at typing but he can’t understand why someone would type out a message when they could just as easily speak to the person.  They have the technology for it, for crying out loud.

_“I’m fine,”_ she finally texts back.  For Daniel or Teal’c, that particular sentence puts Jack at ease.  For Samantha Carter, it makes Jack hit the call button and put the phone to his ear.

She lets it ring twice before she picks up.  “Sir?”  She says it in a low whisper.

“Hey,” he answers her back.  For some reason, he whispers too.

“Hey,” she whispers again. 

And here is the reason he hates texting.  He’s beginning to be braver at communicating via typed messages than his own damned voice and he hates that. 

“Carter, why are we whispering?” he says conspiratorially into his phone, his voice a little louder than hers.

He hears her giggle.  It’s soft and almost non-existent, but hearing her giggle after all these years makes him close his eyes and take a deep, satisfied breath.  “I don’t know why you’re whispering, Sir, but I’m rocking a sleeping baby and don’t want to wake her.”

He sits up straighter.  “Oh,” he says, still whispering.  “I’ll let you go, I just wanted to make sure—”

“No!” she says loud enough to probably wake up the baby.  “No, it’s fine,” she gets back to whispering.  “She’s asleep already… I’m just rocking her ‘cause…” 

He relaxes on the hotel chair but she never does finish her sentence.  

“Because?”  He prompts her.

“I don’t know… I just find that spending all my time saving the world makes more sense if I spend a few hours rocking her.”

“Mmmm,” is his answer.

“I know it sounds stupid… I really can’t explain it.”

“No, no… I actually totally understand,” he says and means it. 

She sits in her rocker and he sits in his hotel chair and they let the silence bring them each peace, just for a moment.

“Tell me about your steak,” she breaks their reverie in her whispering.

He smiles.  “It was fantastic.  Juicy and decadent and…”

She moans into the receiver and he has to stop because it reminds him of her moan during their kiss.

“I haven’t had a good steak in a really long time,” she tells him, ignoring the way he’s stopped speaking.

“We have a very good steakhouse near the Pentagon… it’s not stuffy like the posh places.  I’ll take you next time you’re in town.”

“I’d like that,” she whispers.  “You weren’t there the last time I had to come in.”

“Yeah,” is all he can say. 

“I’m sorry about everything, Sir,” her voice is so small that he doesn’t even want to ask her to be a little bit more specific about what she’s sorry about.  He thinks she probably means picking Pete over him.  He thinks she sounds a little guilty.  He’s about to say something when he hears some kind of commotion on her end, then he hears a voice he’d rather not hear ever again.

“Come on, baby! Just put her down!”

“Shhhh, Pete!” Sam’s harsh whisper.

“Who the hell are you on the phone with?” Pete says loud enough to wake up the baby.

“It’s work.  Pete, will you please be quiet?” Sam whispers again harshly.

Then his phone line goes dead and so does Jack’s heart.  He wants to go to her and kick the potato-guy out and tell her that he’d never yell loud enough to wake up her baby… not in a million years.  He flips his phone closed and wonders if not knowing anything about Samantha Carter’s marriage and personal life was better than this pit he feels deep in the bottom of his stomach.  He almost wants to throw up.

He showers, jerks off to the image he still has of her in his mind and isn’t even ashamed to drink four of the tiny liquor bottles in his tiny hotel refrigerator.  He falls onto the hotel bed, naked, and reaches for his cell phone.  There’s a missed call from her and then a text message. 

_“I’m sorry about that… I had to go.”_

Brief, to the point, and informative.  Except it’s not.  There’s been nothing but misinformation between the two of them over the past years.  He types back: _“Don’t worry about it, Sam.  Hope the baby didn’t wake up.”_

He’s so out of it he doesn’t notice that the message doesn’t send.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just noticed I have not written a note this whole story yet. I hope you are enjoying the angst and real-life-ness of this fic. I appreciate all of the feedback and comments received so far, they really do encourage me to keep writing and improve the quality of the writing. You probably noticed by now that chapters with Episode titles relate to the episode in question, such as this one. There will be at least 20 chapters, possibly even 30, so do hang on for the ride. I will continue to update when possible. Thank you, kindly, for reading.
> 
> Beta by SamnJackAlways. Cover by XFchemist.


	7. Dawning

A few months later, Sam’s in D.C. for a meeting with a special committee that is trying to determine where all of the new Asgard technology needs to be dispersed to.  They’ve named Sam the expert on Asgard technology and O’Neill the expert on the history of human-Asgard race relations.  Jack pops into the meeting for thirty minutes where he assures the committee that Carter has authority to guide this ship as she sees fit and that whatever she says, he expects the committee to accept as law.  When he says it, there is warmth in his eyes and she feels her chest expand with something other than air.  When he stands back up to leave, she notices that the reason she has to shift strategically in her chair has everything to do with the way he fills every inch of his dress uniform.  Age has done really good things to Jack O’Neill.

The meeting is done after 1800 and Sam’s feeling both hungry and bold when she texts him that he owes her a steak dinner in town.  She’s being presumptuous because she still hasn’t determined if he’s single.  She has the momentary thought that he could potentially even be married by now without her knowing, but then she remembers that she’s married as well, is just looking for food, and it’s fine because he used to be a good friend.  The explanations flow from her mind easily and in no time she gets a text back.

_“Are you still in the building?”_

_“Yes,”_ she answers.

_“I need twenty minutes.  Can you find my office?”_

She smiles.  She’s quite sure she can find his office.  She can practically find anything in the Galaxy if she tries hard enough.  _“Take your time.  I’ll be there.”_  

She stops by the restroom, brushes her teeth and runs her fingers through her hair.  She’s getting tired of the pixie look and is thinking of growing her hair out completely.  She thinks about how Pete loves her hair shorter, how he’s always telling her she needs a haircut.  She calls the nanny while she’s still idling in the ladies’ room at the Pentagon and gets an update on Jenny.  She texts Pete and reminds him that he needs to pay the nanny today when he gets home to take care of Jenny.  He texts back that he remembers and asks her what brand of shampoo she needs from the store.  She answers him and wonders if couples always get to this point, where communication is information exchange instead declarations of love.  She’s a bit tired of both.

Sam finds Jack’s office without trouble and chooses to stand by the outside door instead of sitting on the couch she sees by his secretary’s desk.  She’s been sitting all day and her legs are tired of the position.  Eventually, he comes out of the inner office and exchanges a few words with the woman sitting behind the desk.

“Carter!”

“Hi, Sir,” she smiles, poking her head into the office.  She’s not at all surprised that he could sense her presence in the hallway.

“Ready?” He says as he walks towards her.

“Of course,” she smiles.  He almost has to stop walking when he sees her bright smile and all her teeth. 

They walk side by side down the hallway in silence until he turns a corner she wasn’t expecting.  She knows they’re headed towards the staff parking lot.

“I half expected you to have a driver, Sir.”

He shrugs.  “I did.  It felt too… I don’t know… weird.”

“So now you drive yourself.”

He shrugs again.  “I do a lot of thinking while I drive,” he turns toward her and smiles.  “I know that shocks you too.”

She giggles and he has to swallow because he absolutely loves the sound of her doing that.  He stops in front of a car; it’s a fancy silver sedan with bullet-proof windows and she lifts her eyebrows when she realizes that it’s _his_ car.

“What happened to the super duty?

“It’s back home.”

“Oh.”  She wonders if maybe this is Kerry’s car and he drives it on occasion.  She almost doesn’t want to get in it ‘till he says,

“The truck’s too bulky for D.C.,” he unlocks the car and they start to get in.  “Parking spots and roads are smaller here.”

She nods but is still confused.

“So, the super duty is in Colorado?”

“Yeah,” he answers nonchalantly while backing out.  He turns his whole body and looks out the back instead of using the mirrors.  Sam’s always liked that about him.  “The neighbors keep an eye on everything for me.”

She shifts her head to look at him.  “You kept your house in the Springs?”

He looks at her oddly.  “Sure.”

She looks away because he looks shocked that she didn’t know, would think that he left for good.  “I didn’t know that, Sir.”

“Cut the ‘Sir’ crap, Carter.  Makes me feel old.”

She smiles at that.  “If you still have a house there then why were you in a hotel?”

“What?”

“The last time we talked, when you were in the Springs… why did you stay at a hotel?”

“Oh!  Mack’s daughter is living at my place right now.” When he steals a look at her she still looks lost so he clarifies.  “My neighbor.   Something about his daughter getting a divorce and her new condo not being finished yet.  She’s staying a few more months.”

“That’s really nice of you, Si—“ she stops herself from saying the Sir but she doesn’t correct it to Jack, not yet.

“Well, she did promise to kind of clean up the place.  It was an easy decision.”

When they’re finally away from the walls of the Pentagon, he loosens his tie and undoes his top button.  She watches, licks her lips when he moves his head this way and that to try to relax from what she can only imagine was a routinely stressful day at work.  She doesn’t know how he can live this life and not go crazy.  He asks if it’s okay if they stop and change before dinner, telling her people will stare all through their meal if he eats in his fancy General giddup.  She relaxes into the car seat and breathes a sigh of relief, telling him where her hotel is; she doesn’t like to go out in her dress uniform any more than he does.  When they arrive, he parks near the door and gives the bell hop a crisp bill.  He has a gym bag with him. 

“Meet you back here in ten?”

She nods, impressed that he probably carries a change of clothes with him at all times.  She comes back wearing jeans and a long-sleeved black shirt that reminds Jack of her BDU shirt.  She’s wearing a long gold chain with some kind of white stone that rests low in between her breasts.   She’s never been one for jewelry but he really, really likes the look on her.  He closes his mouth before she can see him drool.

The trip to the restaurant is pretty quiet and when they get there she’s pleasantly surprised that while the restaurant still looks nice and is packed, it’s packed with people that are dressed like them and not in suits and ties.  They’re given a flat vibrator and told to wait, so Jack gets them a couple of beers and finds them a corner to stand in, away from the in and out of the door. 

“It’ll be worth the wait, I promise you,” he says, taking a swig of his beer. 

She watches him and wonders if he doesn’t see the irony of what he’s just said.  He’s still talking about the food and the restaurant but she’s thinking about _them_ , the them that never happened and never will and how worth the wait it might have been.

They’re seated ten minutes later and Sam wonders what made their table become available before so many others.  She doesn’t have to wonder long because a huge Hispanic-looking man comes up behind Jack and claps him on the shoulders.

“Jack! You brought a girl!”

“Hey, Tony!  This is Sam.  Sam, this is Tony,” he gestures around the introductions.

“Hi, Tony,” Sam waves but then Tony is giving her a hug.

“You like your steak medium, yes?” Tony asks her, taking both her hands in his.

Sam smiles because she likes Tony immediately and knows why Jack keeps coming back; it has nothing to do with the quality of the steaks.  “Absolutely,” she answers Tony.

“Okay!  I bring you appetizer, yes?”  They don’t have time to answer and they’re not even sure it’s a question before they hear Tony again.  “Jack, no lean cut for you tonight!  I go put in the order!”

Tony disappears and Jack could die a happy man from the massive smile that Samantha Carter is wearing.

“I guess we’re having appetizers,” Sam says.

“Oh, Tony will take good care of us, don’t worry,” he tells her.

“You come here often, Sir?”

He raises his eyebrows at her and she just shrugs. 

“It’s a little strange for me calling you Jack after… everything.”

He looks down and nods.  She feels a little like she’s hurt him and she decides then and there to try harder. 

“I’m here at least once, sometimes twice a week… hence the ‘lean cut’ Tony mentioned.  If I’m having a steak in town, this is it.”

“Wow, I can’t wait.”

“You’ll love it.”

“You look good, Jack,” she says while he takes a long drag of his beer.  He’s unprepared for it and she watches him cough twice and punch his chest a few times with a fist.  She smiles.  “Sorry.”

“I’m fine,” he says, recovering.  “See?  That wasn’t so hard.”

She blushes a little and he decides to add to it.  “You look good too.”

“Ah… bit older,” Sam says in the absence of anything good to say.  He doesn’t comment and she takes a minute to admire him while he’s looking down.  He changed into a gray polo and his bare arms still look as muscled as they ever did.  The buttons on his collar are open and she sees a glimpse of gray and brown chest hair and his shirt is tight enough that she can see his peck muscles clearly outlined.  She has to swallow and think about what might have happened for him to suddenly start wearing clothes that actually fit him.  He used to run around in clothes three times too big for even Teal’c. 

Tony shows up again for a millisecond and drops off a tray in the middle of their table.  It’s a cutting board with some type of grilled bread, cheese and heaven melted on it and dripping down the sides.  Sam’s mouth waters at the sight and she can’t help the excited shriek she lets out.  They start eating and Tony drops off two more ice-cold beers, even though neither of them is finished with their first.

“Talk about good service,” Sam says, impressed.

“Wait till you have the steak,” he repeats.  He doesn’t know what to say or what kind of conversation they should be having.  He’s thrilled she initiated them meeting because he misses her, misses seeing her, but he’s not exactly sure seeing her in this sort of intimate setting will be at all good to his psychological health. 

“So,” she tries in an easy voice, “Tony seemed surprised you’re here with someone.  Do you usually come alone?”

He nods and pretends not to be bothered by the question.  “I’m with people all day, Carter.  If I come here, I’m usually trying to escape the masses of people that need me for General stuff.”

He takes in her curious look and says, “If you want to know something, Carter, just ask.”

She swallows the bread she’s chewing but doesn’t lose his eye-lock.  “Are you and Kerry still together?”

He frowns.  “Kerry?” His eyes flicker around the restaurant.  “Kerry Johnson?”

She nods but starts to look terrified.

“No,” he shakes his head.  “Kerry and I have been over for years, Carter.  Since Dad died.”

Her eyes widen and she’s suddenly unsure she can eat the steak that Tony’s just slid in front of her.  It smells like the best food she’s likely to eat all year.  She hears Jack and Tony chat but can’t decipher the exact words they are saying.  Her ears sound fuzzy and she feels a little dizzy. 

Out of nowhere, his left hand covers her right where it’s laying on the table and she looks first at his hand and then at him.  Tony is no longer around.  “You alright, Carter?”

She pulls her hand back and shakes herself out of the moment.  “Yeah, I’m sorry.  I just thought maybe you guys were together, since you moved here and everything.”

He’s watching her intently.  “No.  I moved here for the job.  I see her a few times a year for work, but that’s it.”

She nods but he thinks she still looks out of it.

“Sam, what are you not telling me?”

“I saw you, with her,” she gets out in a staggered kind of way.

“Today?” He’s utterly confused.

“No! Then…”

“You saw me with her at my house, I know… the day Dad got sick.”

She shakes her head.  “I saw you with her… at a pizza place.”

“When?”

“Um,” she thinks, “it doesn’t matter.”

His hand touches hers again and she closes her eyes. 

“It matters,” he says, and his voice is so gentle.

“In Colorado… before you left.  I was still deciding what to do, I was still deciding if…” she doesn’t have the courage to say it out loud.

“I don’t remember that.  I still had to work with her after we broke it off… I still saw her for SGC business.”

She nods and lets her hand stay under his.

“Are you telling me this has something to do with the decision you made?”

She deflates and realizes she’s probably ruining the wonderful evening they were having.  “It doesn’t matter,” she says again and tries to smile.

Tony comes back and is shocked they haven’t touched the food.

“No, no, no!  Talk later, eat now!  The food, it gets cold!”  Sam’s so grateful because it breaks their moment and makes them both smile at the man and start eating their food.

“Mmm,” Sam says at the first bite.

“I told you,” he says with his mouth full.

Their plates have a good size steak, rice, grilled vegetables and a killer tomato vinaigrette.  A minute later Tony slides in a basket of fries and a plate of deep fried miniature meat pies; he seems pleased that they have started eating and scatters off.  Sam starts laughing and Jack tells her that he needs to bring her in with him more often, that he usually only gets a salad and a few fried bananas in the middle of the table when he comes alone.  That makes her laugh even more.

The food lightens the mood significantly, and Sam tells Jack about the meeting she had, about what she thought of the committee and what she thought they should actually use the Asgard technology for.  He tells her about his work, the tediousness of some of it and then the excitement of other parts.  He asks her, directly, if she feels undermined by the appointment of Cam Mitchel to the team.  She can’t lie to him and she says she knows the reason why, that she’s adapted well to the consequences of her actions.

When they drive away she notices the name of the restaurant.

“Tony’s?  The name of the restaurant is Tony’s?”

Jack smiles but doesn’t take his eyes off the road.  “Tony’s a great guy.”

She laughs, realization dawning.  “The owner of the restaurant serves you every time?”

Jack shrugs.  “Tony’s Brazilian… has a huge family he employs and supports.  First time I came in I was in uniform.  He came over and told me he didn’t want any trouble.  We started chatting, turned out he’d been applying for citizenship for four years but could never find a sponsor to help him.  He’d taken the English exam twice and failed.  He passed the oral, but never the written,” Jack explained nonchalantly as he turned here and there, making his way through the streets of D.C.  “The whole time he thought they were failing him for some other reason, and he was suspicious of anyone in government work that came into the restaurant… he couldn’t afford an immigration attorney.  I looked into it and told him exactly what was happening.  The whole kitchen staff is Brazilian, so even though he’s here, he ends up speaking Portuguese at work and at home.”

“So, what did you do?”  Sam asks, on the edge of her seat.

Again, Jack answers like he’s done nothing of importance.  “I taught him English.”

“You taught him English.”

“To read and write it, mostly.  He already spoke it pretty well.”

“And you sponsored him.” It’s not a question.

Jack turns a corner.  “Sure.”  He doesn’t tell her he also sponsored half his family.

It’s all a rush when she remembers why exactly she fell in love with this man in the first place.

“Anyway, I got to go to his naturalization ceremony, which was pretty cool.  There was a whole group of Sudanese refugees there too… they were so proud to say their oath.  It puts things into perspective when you see things like that.”

Sam smiles and feels so good she can’t quite explain it.

“It was a really good steak,” is all she can think to say; her eyes haven’t left him the whole car ride, not for a moment.

“Brazilians,” Jack offers.  “He says cooking perfect beef is in their blood.”

Sam blinks.

“Is being a really nice guy in yours?”  She has no idea where the comment came from and she’s shocked that she said it out loud.  He coughs and she feels like she just made the car ride suddenly very awkward.  She looks away for the first time.  “I’m sorry if that’s awkward.”

He clears his throat again.  “I’m not very complex, Carter.  I just try to do the right thing.”

She nods and agrees with him.  She wonders how he can be so damn good at figuring out what the right thing is when she is so handicapped at it.  In no time, he’s idling in front of her hotel and she has the urge to invite him in for a night cap.  She doesn’t.

“Thank you again for dinner, Sir.”

“Jack.”

She smiles but not as fully as she did before their conversation about Kerry.  “Jack,” she repeats.

“This was nice,” he comments.

“It was,” she hedges.  “It’s nice being your friend… again.”

“I never stopped.” She looks at him and they communicate silently for a moment.  Neither has stopped, she’s not entirely sure she ever will.  She’s also not entirely sure they’re still talking about platonic friendship.

“Have a good night, Sam.  Safe trip in the morning.”  She’s grateful for the dismissal, because she really needs to get out of his car.

“I will.  Good night, Jack.”

He nods and she closes his car door.  When Pete calls at night, she doesn’t mention who she had dinner with and he doesn’t tell her he forgot to pay the nanny.

Life as usual. 


	8. Unending

A few months pass and SG1 continues to fight battles no one can even imagine.  Landry comes along for an important Asgard-related mission and it forces Jack back to the SGC to man things and make sure the mountain doesn’t collapse in Landry’s absence.  His house is empty again and he uses the work trip to take care of the personal things he still has left in Colorado Springs.  Landry and SG1 are headed to Orilla aboard the Odyssey because after months of no contact with Earth, the little green aliens finally request their presence.  Sam doesn’t know what it can be about but he can imagine the glint in her eyes.  He had a brief conversation with her when he arrived on the mountain to relieve Landry, and he remembers her smile when he told her to have fun on Orilla.   

Jack becomes seven different kinds of panicked when five days into his stint on the mountain, the crew of the Odyssey show up via Stargate, briefing him on all matter of incredible and horrid things.  The Asgard had invited them to Orilla to gift humanity with everything they had – their technology and all their knowledge.  The crew tell him in detail about the energy weapons, the Asgard computer core, the fact that the Asgard were dying and wanted to end their existence before they completely degenerated physically as a race.  He hears the flight crew explain the Ori Mother ships that show up out of nowhere and follow them everywhere, even while in hyper speed.  He hears the scientists say that Thor told Colonel Carter that _they_ are the fifth race, that they have an important role, that they are the ones that will preserve the future.

Jack’s sweating when they get to the end of their story.  Brilliant in all her wisdom, Carter had suggested beaming the crew to the nearest planet with a Stargate and taking every chance possible in order to protect the legacy of the Asgard.  She had stayed behind.  Sure, the rest of SG1 and Landry had stayed too, but they aren’t the reason he’s clenching his teeth.  There’s nothing he can do, there’s nowhere he can look for them, and he doesn’t know if he’ll survive losing all his friends if this is really their end.  Thor was never a regular personal visitor, but Jack would be lying if he pretended not to be choked up to hear about his friend’s death.  He fidgets for days and is in such a sour mood that even Walter avoids his temporary office.  He has to believe that Carter will find a way out of their predicament, the way that she always does.

After a week of not knowing, NASA transmits a recording they picked up in deep space, an encrypted message from the Odyssey.  The package is safe and the Odyssey is returning home as scheduled, all five remaining crew members onboard and alive.  Jack can only guess the package is the Asgard computer core, filled with an entire race’s knowledge and history.  He has a feeling Sam’s Asgard committee will need extra members now.  There is no end to his relief that he doesn’t have to call Pete and tell him that his wife is missing, that she is dead.

They beam part of the Odyssey’s crew back onboard and are in turn beamed down to the SGC gate room.  They all look exhausted and Teal’c looks oddly older.  He makes them debrief, even though Landry is their commander and was aboard the ship, he still believes in talking it out and getting important information across immediately, before one is able to forget details. 

He’s shocked to hear they’ve lived in a time dilation bubble for fifty years, that in the end Carter finally figured out how to reverse time in a localized field and he’s floored to hear that the idea to go back in time was actually Vala’s.  But what really takes the cake, for him, is that the person explaining all of this is Teal’c, him being the only person in the room that remembers all of the years aboard the ship and every conversation that took place; he’s the only one that remained aged and the one man to save all of their lives.  He can see on Carter’s face that there are emotions clamoring to break and so he dismisses them, hands Landry back the reigns and collects his things to leave for good.

He pokes his head in the infirmary and talks to Daniel, makes sure him and Teal’c are okay and makes concrete plans to meet them for dinner.  Carter’s not there and he’s convinced she’s already run home until he enters the locker room and she’s standing in front of her closed locker and staring at her name-plate.  She must hear him because she turns and stares at him and then he sees that the left side of her face has clear streaks of tears that end as a puddle on her uniform. 

“Sam,” he says tenderly and takes two steps toward her.

She sucks her lips into her mouth and tries to swallow and he closes the rest of the distance between them.  When he reaches to hug her she threats her arms around his middle and buries her face in his chest, the sobs coming as soon as she’s hidden.  He hugs her tightly and feels her body shutter with her tears, runs his hands up and down her back to calm her.  He hasn’t hugged her like this since Jacob died and he’s flooded with her smell and her body and the memory of loving her.

“You reversed time, you fixed everything, you saved the Asgard legacy,” he whispers to her.

She shakes her head against his chest and he hears her say Teal’c’s name. 

“He’s got at least another hundred years with us, Carter.  You heard him say as much.”

She stops crying but doesn’t let go.  At one point, she moves her head to the crook of his neck and they hug tighter.  She takes deep breaths, drowns herself in the smell, warmth and body of this man, the comfort he’s so solidly offering.

“I miss this,” she whispers in an incredibly shaky voice.

He breathes in and out.  “I know, Sam,” is all he can say.

“Thank you,” she says and starts to let go.

He wants to say “always,” but he doesn’t, not this time.  “The guys and I are getting a bite to eat… might be good if you came along.”

She shakes her head.  “I need to see my daughter,” she tears up again.  “I miss her,” she wipes her nose with her right sleeve.

“Yeah,” he nods, agreeing that it’s probably exactly what she needs to do.

“Can I call you later?”  He doesn’t know where that came from but he’s sure he means it more than he’s meant anything else.

She looks up at him and meets his eyes. 

Jack realizes she has a husband now, will receive comfort and emotional release at home.  She doesn’t need him, doesn’t need his hug in the locker room or his calls late at night.  She notices his flight reaction and says,

“You can call me anytime you want to, Jack.  We’re friends, remember?”

He relaxes and nods.  “Take care, Carter.”

sSsSsSsSs

Jack has dinner with Teal’c, Daniel and Vala and no matter how much they try to get information out of the big guy, Teal’c takes seriously his own self vow to keep the fifty or sixty years they shared in space to himself.  He does tell them the irony of it all, that by the time Carter did figure out how to reverse time in a localized field, that they didn’t have enough power to do so, because they’d been using up power to buy time to let her figure it out.  Jack’s suddenly very glad Sam didn’t join them for dinner.  They discuss the Asgard in code around the bar, wondering at the rationale of committing mass suicide instead of letting life take its own course.

It’s three o’clock in the morning when his cell phone rings.  He’s asleep but he’s been the base commander for over ten days, so he’s used to the middle of the night calls and has been sleeping clothed for the first time in years. 

“O’Neill,” he says into the phone, forgetting momentarily that he’s not on-call anymore, that Landry is back on the job.

“You never called.” It’s Sam’s voice, he registers as much, so he sits up and snaps out of the hazy pull of sleep.

“Sam,” he acknowledges, looks at the clock and realizes the hour.  “You okay?”

She doesn’t answer and so he turns his lamp on and swings his legs out of bed.  “I thought better of it… I thought you’d be spending time with your family.”

Still she doesn’t speak, but he can hear her breathe on the other side of the line.

“Sam, talk to me,” he begs, worried about what might be going on in her head.

“I’ve been studying Asgard for the past year,” she says.  It’s completely out of the field of things he thinks she might say.  “The language,” she clarifies.

“Mmmm,” he voices, letting her know he’s listening.

“It probably helped when it came to understanding the ship upgrades and the Asgard computer core but I just wonder…” she stops and he hears a million things she isn’t saying.

“Carter, you cannot blame yourself for what happened.”  He stands and walks through his dark house, turning on a few lights and trying to hear her breathe.

“I’ve asked Teal’c about it, asked him about a lot of things… he won’t tell me,” she says in a weak voice.

“You’re probably the one that told him not to tell you.  You know that, Carter.  You’re the one always telling us the dangers of time travel.”

“I know,” and he can almost see her nodding her head.

“And?”

She sighs and he hears her sit somewhere.  “And… when I imagine living fifty years without Jenny I feel an enormous amount pain,” the last part of her sentence is said in a strangled voice, and he knows she’s crying again.

He lets her cry for a moment, decides he will say what he is thinking even though he doesn’t know if it will help her or hurt her.  “I know exactly what that feels like, Sam.”  He’s been living without Charlie for almost twelve and sometimes, he doesn’t even want to live.  “I’m so thankful you reversed time… for all our sakes.”

“Oh, Jack…” she says, realizing that he has indeed felt her pain.

He lets her think a moment, let’s her feel, cry. 

“And what else?”

She sniffles.  “Then when I think about living without… other people for that long.  I just… I don’t know how I ever survived.”

His heart beats fast and he pauses in his movements around the house.  He doesn’t hear her cry or breathe, and he wonders if she hung up the phone.

“Carter?”

“Yeah,” her voice is steady now. 

“Are you talking about Pete?”

She’s silent on her end.  She’d arrived home and cuddled Jenny for two hours and then had sex with Pete, twice.  He’d fallen asleep rather quickly and she was left awake, thinking about Jack’s exact question to her now.  She feels shame that she thinks she could probably live fifty years without her actual husband but feels agony when she thinks of living it without _him_.

“Jack…”

His eyes blink rapidly and everything he’s been thinking about since their dinner in D.C. comes rushing at him all at once.  She’s breaking on the other end of the line and she’s trying to be quiet so she doesn’t wake the other occupants of her house.

“I need to ask you something,” he says in a voice that doesn’t even try to betray his nervousness.

“Okay,” she’s just as nervous and she has a feeling this is going to be a very personal question.

“You were shocked at the restaurant that day,” he starts and knows, even though he can’t see her, that she’s right with him in the conversation.  “You made your decision to marry Pete because you thought I was back with Kerry.” He pitches this as the truth and waits to see what she will say.

She swallows repeatedly and feels a thickness in her throat.  “It wasn’t the only contributing factor.” She finds that she can say this and knows that it’s not a lie.  She hears him breathe out. 

“But it was one of them,” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Shit, Sam,” he says. 

Tears well in her eyes.

“It wasn’t the only reason,” she tries to placate him.  “I wanted a family.  You know that.  I know you know that.”  She doesn’t tell him about the conversation she overheard in Daniel’s lab.

“I did try,” he says and she can’t stand how broken he sounds on the phone.  “I did try, I promise you I did.” It’s all that he can say to her.  

“Jack,” she mangles out, realization that he never wanted her to be anyone but his.

“I wish…”

“I know,” she answers pitifully.  She wishes she could reverse time and go to him, that day with the pizza and the anger and the letting go of dreams that were both of theirs.  She knows she’s had time travel overload and that it’s the only reason her brain is even coming up with the suggestion.  She has regrets but she also has a lot to be thankful for.  Pete’s loved her and given her a child, a beautiful legacy of her own.

He’s silent on his side and she hears his complete loss of composure.

“I’m so sorry, Jack.  I never meant to hurt you.”

He composes an answer that he isn’t sure is all that truthful but then they both hear a child’s cries coming from what can only be the baby monitor Sam must be carrying around.

“I have to go,” she whispers.  She’s worried Pete might hear the baby too and then wonder who she’s on the phone with in the middle of the night.

“You need to sleep too, Sam,” he says as a goodbye.

“Bye, Jack.”

Her line goes dead and Jack is left standing in the middle of his living room wondering why the hell his life has to be so complicated and why he can’t seem to catch a break, no once, not ever.  He’s glad for once that he lives in Washington and can get away from this situation.  Seeing Sam Carter every day now and knowing this would kill him and he already feels pretty dead.

He thinks there has to be a Jack O’Neill in an alternate reality out there with a life better than his.


	9. Us

Jack’s gotten used to the night sky in D.C. and he’s started enjoying the air here, even if it’s more polluted than he’d like.  He’s outside, drinking a beer, still in his suit pants and stiff uniform shirt.  He looks down and moves his feet, noticing how the moonlight reflects off his shiny general’s shoes.  He wants to retire so he can stargaze back in Colorado, or better yet, in his cabin in Minnesota.  He could hold a fishing pole and a beer at the same time, and he suddenly longs for flip-flops and the smell of fresh bait. 

His ass buzzes and he jumps up, startled and remembering that his phone is in his back pocket.  He flips it open and sees an incoming call from Samantha Carter.  They’ve been texting and talking more, but he still feels like he shouldn’t answer, at least at first.   It’s been months since the hug that caused him significant setback in his Samantha obsession, and he feels himself falling deeper into the pit each time they talk.  The distance and silence had dulled the anger and pain, and now this constant reminder of what she meant to him, what she still means to him, is something he can’t always deal with.  It’s a Monday night and he wonders back to her mission rotation schedule, wonders if this could be a work-related call.  It’s good enough of an excuse for him to answer.   

“O’Neill,” he answers, in the million-to-one chance that it is a work call.

“Hey,” she says.  Definitely not a work call.

“Hi.”

“How are you?”  Her voice is soft, calm.

“Good, and you?” He answers, trying to relax too.

“I’m alright.  Is this a bad time?”

“No, you actually caught me at home.”

“Wow, twenty-hundred on a Monday.  Impressive.”

“Oh, yeah,” he drawls out and reaches down to tap his knuckles on the wooden floor.  “Knock on wood. Next thing you know the planet will be in peril again.”

“Oh, I hope it’s a long, long time before that happens again.”

He sighs and she does too.

“Pete’s at work tonight… and Jenny’s asleep.”

He waits to answer, waits to see if she’s going to say something else.  “Okay.”

“I just wanted you to know we won’t be interrupted.”

“Yeah.”  Murphy’s law for them means that when the conversation is about to become revelatory, something cries, talks, falls apart.

There’s a heavy, awkward silence because neither knows what to say.

“Does Pete work every night?”

“No,” she answers.  “He works one night-shift a week, on Mondays.  He goes in at 6p and gets off at 6a… sleeps till noon and then works 1p till 11p.  That gets him off on most weekends.” 

“Wow.  So how do you coordinate who keeps the kid if you’re off world?”

She sighs.   “We have a nanny.  She’s basically scheduled to be at our house every minute that Pete isn’t.  His schedule seems odd but it’s fixed, the same every week, so at least we can count on him being here.  My schedule on the other hand…”

“Way irregular.”

“Yeah,”

“And he’s okay with that?”

“He doesn’t have a choice. _I_ don’t have a choice.”

He wants to say that she could make more demands on her schedule.  That’s she’s important enough and has given enough to the program that they would give her some things back… as long as she asked for them, but he doesn’t.  “Yeah,” he says instead.

“I think he hates having to pay the nanny more than anything.” She pauses to take a drink of something.  “If he had his way…”

“You’d stay home,” he finishes for her.

“And have dinner at the table at five,” she adds.

Jack wants to call the guy a Jackass but he refrains.  She’s silent and he can’t tell what she’s thinking.

“So, what do you usually do on Monday nights?”  His mind tells him immediately that this is so not the conversation he should be having with her, but then he backtracks, thinks, to hell with it, he wants to talk to her, wants the friendship, wants to get her mind off of her slimy husband.

“Hmmm,” she thinks.  “I usually let Jenny stay up late, rock her way longer than I should.  I end up going to bed early.  I do stupid things like skip dinner and have too much wine.   Sometimes I take a bath, watch re-runs of Wormhole Extreme…”

He laughs.  “You actually watch that?”

“Oh, yeah,” she laughs too.  “I find it really relaxing.  They make everything look and sound so ridiculous and… I don’t know, it brings some levity to the shit we have to endure every day.  I like the easy banter between the team-mates… the tension between Colonel Danning and Major Monroe.” She pauses for a moment wondering if she should apologize for being over-familiar with a man she wants to be over-familiar with but never could.

He coughs on his end… or maybe clears his throat, she can’t tell which.

“You’d tell me if this conversation makes you uncomfortable, right?” She asks straight out.

“You’re not stepping over any bounds, if that’s what you’re asking.  And don’t even think of calling me Sir.”  He doesn’t care about boundaries anymore, doesn’t even care if this conversation is being recorded by their worst enemy.  He recognizes the loss of inhibition, but doesn’t blink an eye when his desire for her makes him focus his mind on her best qualities and close his eyes to relish them.  He wants to continue to feel the pull she has on him no matter how out of reach she is to him.  The fence keeping her away used to be the Air Force.  Now, the fence is even higher; added on is a collection of vows she made to another man.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

He opens his eyes, blows out all the air in his lungs and decides for honesty.  “Yes, this conversation makes me a little uncomfortable… but not for the reasons you’re thinking.  And no, I don’t want to hang up.  I’d rather have the awkward than not talk to you at all.”

He can actually hear her swallow on the other side.

“ _You_ can’t stop talking,” he says.  “That makes it _really_ awkward.”

She makes a sound of laughter that he likes.  They let themselves breathe a bit and it relieves the pressure on the conversation, like a steam valve being left to vent.

“It’s hard not working with you anymore,” she says after a minute.  “I thought it would be easier, that it would be better, but it’s not.  It’s awful.”

“Yeah.” He knows what it is she’s talking about.

“I've thought a lot about us,” she prefaces and then holds her breath. 

“Carter, there is no ‘us.’”

She sighs.  “The ‘us’ that never happened.”

“Sam…”

“The ‘us’ that’s left,” she interrupts whatever it is he’s about to say.

He’s silent because he’s reluctant to admit anything and his mind is still clearly distracted by the heavy pull his heart has toward this woman. 

“We’re both making it through these phone conversations because for whatever reason, you and I still need the ‘us.’  In whatever way we can still have it.”

He exhales and is actually floored by her brilliance.  “I don’t know what to say, Carter.”

She smiles on her end but of course, he can’t see that.  “I know that, I know you.”

The comment warms his heart because with her, he really doesn’t have to come up with things to say.

“When I got back from the Odyssey, they gave me a week downtime and I…”

“What’s done is done, Sam.  We can’t keep rehashing this.  It won’t do either of us any good.”

“Well, I can’t stop, can’t stop thinking about it, about the choices we made and why we made them.  I asked you to try and you did.  I just wasn’t thrilled with the choice you gave me.”

He knows all this already, doesn’t really want to relive the feeling of experiencing her disappointment.  “I know.  It was a horrible choice.”

She’s silent, composing her answer, so he adds, “You shouldn’t feel bad that you wanted more than I could give you.”

“No, listen.”

“Sam...”

“I didn’t… like the choice you gave me but I never acknowledged that you tried.  I know you, and I know it was… monumental for you to even have that conversation with your superiors.  I know that it must have killed you to be told we couldn’t be together.  I just never… I never recognized you for that and I'm,” she has to pause and take a deep breath.  “Jack, I’m really sorry.”

“Carter…”

“Jack,”

“It’s okay,”

“No, Jack, it’s really not.”

“Sam…”

“The thing is… _I_ never tried,” she says it and it ends their back and forth, momentarily.

“What?” he says softly on his end.

“You tried, but I never tried,” she confesses.

“What are you talking about?”

“You're not the only one who could have retired.  You're not the only one who could have sought reassignment.  I never tried, Jack.  I was so consumed with myself, my career, my needs, me, me, me.  I never once stopped to think that maybe you actually were doing all that you could do and that it might actually be my turn to do something too.”  She pauses for a second, takes in a deep breath.  “I wanted you, but I never tried.” 

Her voice is a broken whisper by the end of her confession and Jack feels like he’s being cut open with a surgical knife.  He wants to beg the surgeon for more oxygen.

“Sam…”

“I’m sorry… sorry that I blamed you, accused you of passivity when in reality I never made anything happen myself.”

He takes a deep breath and repeats what he’s stated before:  “I'm not sure it will do us any good to rehash this.  What's done is done.”

“Sometimes I just need to say things - to make it alright.”

He feels the beginnings of a headache and he realizes he’s clenching his jaw tightly. 

“Just tell me one thing,” he loosens his jaw but feels the tightness show up in his stomach.

“Okay,” she concedes.

“Are you happy?  All I ever wanted for you was… I just want you to be happy.”

“Yes,” she answers, but not immediately.

“And why do I not believe you?”

“Jack,” she tries.

“Shanahan treats you right... despite everything?”

“Yes.”  Jack thinks he hears a sniffle.  “Despite everything, he worships the ground I walk on.”

“You deserve that.”

Inside, his land line is ringing and he closes his eyes in an effort to will it to stop.

“What about you?” she asks.

“What about me?”

“Are you happy?”

No one has asked Jack this, perhaps ever, and he doesn’t know the answer.  He’s saved when his incoming call beep signals on his line.  He knows it must be important when inside his house, the landline rings again.

“I’m getting another call, Sam.  It looks important.”  Apparently, knocking on wood doesn’t really work.

“Okay,” her voice is already distant.

“Have a good night.”

“Jack?”

“Yeah?”

“Take care of yourself.”

 “You too.”

The call turns out to be important.  Atlantis is in trouble and the IOA is demanding that Jack take a road trip and help Woolsey determine if Elizabeth Weir is still competent enough to keep their expedition secure.  Jack thinks the IOA doesn’t really care about the personnel’s safety, he knows they just want control of the Ancient city.  Jack packs a bag and readies himself to be beamed up.  He settles onboard, into a bunk that is fancier than most; and when he closes his eyes, he dreams about making sandwiches. 

He wakes up several times throughout the night because of the confined bed, and he can’t quite get this particular dream out of his mind.   He spent hours making sandwiches, in his dream, and he remembers the feeling of satisfaction and joy in doing so.  He wonders about the question Sam asked him, if he is happy, and he doesn’t know exactly the answer to that.  No, he isn’t happy, not by a long shot, but he still has things to live for… isn’t entirely unhappy.  He wanders through the spaceship and finds the mess, asks around until he finds a sandwich.  The airman who brings him one looks young and frightened and Jack wishes, momentarily, for some of the kid’s youth.  When he sits and takes a bite, he’s disappointed that the sandwich doesn’t fill the hole in his stomach or silence the cue signaling to him that hunger might be the means to satisfaction. 

He finishes the sandwich and holds still, keeps his face blank when he remembers Samantha Carter telling him something about the fact there is still a “them.” He thinks about the dream and then about her; she fills the void and it has nothing to do with hunger.  It isn’t sandwiches, it’s her, it’s _them_.  It always will be.


	10. Arks, Wormholes, and Ninja Warriors

The months run along as fast as their conversations and neither seem to realize their frequency until Sam gets caught on a particular mission and she misses several texts and calls from Jack.  He stops immediately when he realizes that in her absence, Pete might pick up her phone and do his slimy investigative work.  But then he calms, remembers that she leaves her phone at work, in her locker, and that the screen is as password protected as his.

They have an easy banter now, and he’s past being shy about initiating contact.  She used to be the only one to call, but now he does too.  They don’t talk about their feelings, they don’t talk about the miscommunication and events that led to Sam marrying Pete.  They don’t talk about Pete at all, except to fill holes in her stories about Jenny.  She can’t exactly black Pete out of her daily narrative when she talks to Jack, and he understands, wants the truth about her days even if they include mention of the man that gets to wake up next to her instead of him.

He likes the friendship they have, even if it’s not exactly the relationship he always dreamed of having with her.  He wanted to be the one to sooth her nightmares and the one to run his hands along her alabaster skin.  He still wonders if she has freckles on her breasts; he thinks he always will.  He’s seen the ones that line her clavicle and a few that pepper her bare arms.  In the end, to him, he’s just a man, and his frustration with the lack of carnal knowledge about her drives him mad.  He can’t do any of those things but he does feel a swell of satisfaction when she calls and needs his command advice, when she texts him something stupid that Daniel did, when she tells him about a new steak place that opened up two miles from her house.

They have a solid friendship now, and he finds himself shopping for a Christmas present for her though it’s only April.  He figures it’s okay to just keep it at home for a few months – no big deal.  He thinks about what she might want and he remembers the necklace she wore that time in D.C. when he took her to Tony’s.  He flips through a few flyers that arrived in his Sunday paper and sees one he likes.  He needs new workout shorts anyways, so he goes to the department store he knows has everything – suits, shorts, shoes, jewelry. 

He picks out his needs first, two new shorts, a package of white ankle-socks, a new jar of cologne, and then, heads down to the ladies’ area.  There, near the make-up counters and racks lined with leather purses and Hermès scarves are several counters of jewelry.  A primly-dressed woman with glasses and immaculate white hair approaches him immediately offering help.  Jack thinks he must look like he’s willing to drop big money on a begging-for-forgiveness gift or something.  He pulls out the sheet he ripped out from the flyer and shows the woman the image of the item that he wants.  It’s a dainty necklace of silver with a single pearl dangling from the short neck-line.

“Excellent choice,” the madam says and fetches it from a display that is locked with a key.  She hands the delicate necklace to Jack, explaining what kind of pearl it is, what quality metal the chain contains, how beautiful it will look on any lovely lady.

Jack likes it, pictures it on Sam’s slender neck.  He’s almost decided to take it when underneath his hands, in the glass display below, he sees another necklace in a long line of many.  The saleswoman notices.

“Shall I get something else out for you to see, young man?”

Jack smiles and appreciates the quip, he hasn’t been called a young man in a really long time.  He points to what he wants and as she gets it out and lays in on the felt before them, Jack thinks madam looks disappointed that his second choice is slightly cheaper than the first.

He runs his fingers through it and he hears the woman say that this chain is shorter, that it will lie right here, she points to a spot below her neck, near the hollow created by the bones in the woman’s clavicle.  Jack pictures the same spot on Sam, remembers her freckles, and decides that this is it, this is the one, this is the present for the woman he can’t love.

He walks out of the store and feels a little like a woman.  He has several bags and two tiny boxes that are wrapped in exquisite paper.  He’d been so pleased with the success of his shopping trip and so thrown off by the perfection of the second necklace that he had bought both.  He figured the first would be ideal for Cassie and this way he was done shopping for a good long while.  He hoped she would like it.  He knew Cassie would love hers.

A week after the shopping trip he gets a secure email saying she’s alive.  All he’d known about her mission was that it involved a pesky IOA representative and rumors of an ark that might be the answer to all of their problems.  Her email tells him how the ark brainwashes people to see the truth about the Ori, that the ascended nut-cases, including Adria, are all dead, and that the powerful ark is headed back with her to the SGC to be opened in front of the prior they have in custody, taking care of their own galaxy’s pesky religious dominators.  Tacked on to the end of her email is a note that she’d kill for a good steak. 

He’s stuck at the Pentagon dealing with a completely unrelated matter and there is a battle in his mind for which response should go out.  The man, gentleman, and friend inside of him wants to offer to fly her over for a private dinner at Tony’s.  The other, the exhausted and emotionally wounded cast-off wants to tell her to shove it, to get her lame-ass husband to get her a steak and leave him the hell alone.  Sometimes, he doesn’t know where these outbursts come from.  That feeling lasts only three seconds because he emails her back that he wants a steak too. 

Five hours later finds both of them on a couch – him in his D.C. bungalow, her in the Shanahan residence, eating steaks out of foiled to-go containers and laughing together as they watch men and women try to defeat the complicated course on this particular episode of American Ninja Warrior.  It isn’t a Monday night and Jack doesn’t ask where Pete might be and Sam doesn’t volunteer the information, but Jack does know he’s not around.  She has him on speaker phone so she can cut her steak and ever so often he can hear  Jenny cough from the baby monitor – Sam says she has a cold.

“Whoa!” she exclaims as a woman half her size jumps from one beam to the other.

“How can they do that?” he adds to the exchange.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been able to do that.”

“Oh, damn.  She’s about to fall,” Jack calls out and sure enough, the buff, short woman takes a misstep in a field of tiny stone pillars and lands in a heap on the padded flooring.  “Ouch!”

“Awe,” Sam cries out, “I liked her!”

“You just liked her ‘cause she said she had a baby last year and you’re feeling like she’s a little like you.”

Sam doesn’t deny his statement.  The commercials come on and she asks him how his steak was.

“Alright,” is his answer.  “Not as good as eating it at the restaurant, but it filled me up.”  He’s quiet for a minute until he figures he needs to just ask.

“You going to tell me what’s really on your mind or are we gonna watch American Ninja Warrior all night and skirt around what’s bothering you?”

She isn’t surprised he had noticed that something’s up with her, he can read her well, knows her well.  She just isn’t sure she wants to talk about it.

“I don’t know, Jack.”

“Wow,” he lays his head on the back of the couch.  “So, it’s something serious.”

“No, not really serious, just…”

“Tell me,” his tone isn’t commanding, just inviting.

“I guess important enough that it gets me down and that the people who know me notice.”

“Did he notice?”  He asks only because he wants to know if he’s been pushing her around and getting her even downer than she already is.

“I haven’t even seen him yet.  He’s at a conference.”

“Oh.”

“I’m glad.”

“Sam,” he isn’t sure what he wants to say.

“I’m glad because he would be asking a million questions that I’m not in the mood to deal with.  And I have a significant bruise that I don’t care to explain.”

He’s silent a moment, wonders if she’s okay, wonders where the bruise is and how she got it.

“Yeah,” is all he gets out.  She doesn’t need to be peppered with questions, not about this.

“I get tired of telling him that I just can’t tell him.”

“You can tell me, Sam,” he gets that she’s bypassing the real story and the real thing that has her in this particular dumpy mood.  His voice is still calm and inviting and Sam wants to tell him, tell him everything.  Their friendship is important to her but she also views it as something of a thrill – there’s enough impurity in her thoughts about Jack O’Neill as to make their long-distance friendship extremely dangerous, if only in her opinion.  She’s emotionally open and available to Jack in a way that she rarely is for Pete anymore.  Pete’s become lackluster, like a shiny penny that’s been sitting in too much muddy water for far too long.  Theirs was never a fairly-tale love affair, just an ordinary pairing, like the endless mating rituals of humans since time began.  The thought creates enough anxiety in her to make her pause.

“Sam?”

“Why was Cam given command of the Odyssey?”

“What?”

“On the mission,” she breathes out and repeats, “why was Cam Mitchell given command of the Odyssey?”

He’s silent because he hasn’t read any mission reports yet, doubts any have even been written.

“That’s what I’m thinking about, anyway,” she says.

“Where were you when all of this was going on? On the bridge?”

“No,” she sighs.  “That’s the thing… I know exactly why Cam was put in command and not me.  I already know why, but I still can’t get over it.  I needed to be the brains of the scientific part of the mission.  It made sense.  At one point I even ordered them to solder me into the room with the Asgard computer core, so it makes perfect sense that Cam was flying the ship and not me.”

He lets her talk, doesn’t interrupt because he gets that she needs to verbalize her thoughts.

“I guess when push comes to shove I’m still pathetic enough to want the glory of command.”

“You aren’t pathetic, not in the least,” he says, his voice full of meaning.  “You deserve the command, but I agree with your assessment.  Had I been there, I would have stuck you on the science side too.  It’s your expertise.  No one knows it as well as you do.”

“I know.”

“Whoa, this guy has been drinking way too many protein shakes,” Jack says about the next ninja warrior that looks buffer than Teal’c.

Sam giggles.  “I don’t know, Sir.  I’d like to take him home…”

He grunts.

“Did you know that the Odyssey cloaks?”

“What, the whole thing?” Jack asks.

“Yup.”

“Nice!”

“I know!  It’s just so awesome.”

Jack lets her ramble on about the Odyssey’s many cool features and he wonders if Carter, in all her brilliance, will ever do a job where she feels completely satisfied and equally accomplished.  When her speech patterns off, he asks:

“You know that continuing to challenge you at your job is starting to get difficult.”

She thinks for a minute.  “That’s not it, Jack.  I have plenty of challenges, and I don’t see myself as a know-it-all or destined to be the greatest and therefore should be handed command at every opportunity.  That’s not it.  I can’t explain the feeling, but that’s what mills around in my mind after things like that happen.  If I said what I said to you out loud at the SGC, people would label me the biggest brat.  But this is you.  I can tell you all of that without actually _feeling_ like a brat and…” she pauses and exhales loudly.  “Well, it’s a nice change.”

“Than having to hold it all in?”

“Yeah.”

“I get that.”

They watch the buff dude make his way through three-fourths of the course and then face plant at the same exact location Tiny Girl fell just moments earlier.

“They need to focus.  They’re all getting tired before the hardest part and no one is seeing the danger of those long pillars coming.”  She states it simply, and she doesn’t equate what she’s said to anything but the television show and the obstacle course, but Jack does.  He wonders how she can’t see it.

“I still think you’re the best damn officer out there, Carter.  You have incredible things ahead of you.  Just remember that.”

On her couch, she smiles.

“When will I see you again, Jack?”

Warning bells go off in his head because he can feel how his heart starts beating so much faster once she’s said it.

“I don’t know.  I don’t have any trips your way anytime soon.”

“Me neither,” she says, her voice a little sad. 

He thinks that it’s probably a good thing since he can’t get her out of his head while he showers.  He doesn’t know that when they hang up, Sam lowers her pants and rubs herself silly until she sees stars that are bigger than the ones she saw from space.   He knows how deep in he is but she doesn’t seem to have a clue.  He wishes the Ark of Truth had been programmed with a message for her and cast its revelation upon her face, but then he thinks she subconsciously must know, she has to know.


	11. Punches

Summer is hotter than ever this year and Jack’s uniform itches in places he’d rather not scratch in public.  It’s not been an easy day, but then it never is when he’s in charge of so much.  He’s thinking of retiring, again, just because he’s tired of all the politics, and the dying airmen, and the wars that seem to come and go and then come again.  He hates sending men and women out to space not knowing if they are ever coming back.  He cringes each time he signs off on a special assignment for a certain Colonel.

Their relationship is something unusual at best, considering who they are and the frequency of their conversations.  They consider themselves to be really good friends and while there are underlying feelings that they don’t voice, they seem content to continue the façade as long as nobody else calls them on it. 

It’s late at night, quite late for his new standards when he finally sits and flips through the missed calls, texts and voice messages on his phone.  There’s a voicemail from Sam asking him to call her back.  He has to answer a few that are pertinent to the safety of Air Force personnel first, and then texts her to see if she’s still awake.  She answers by calling him.

“Hey, you alright?” he asks right away.

“Yeah,” she says, but sounds breathless.

“Carter, what’s going on?”

She’s silent on her end except for her breathing, which seems to be irregular.

“Sam?” He’s a little impatient because it’s late and he’s already dealt with a million problems today.

“There’s something I have to tell you.”

He’s silent waiting for her.  His interest is peeked but he’s starting to get the vibe that it won’t be news he’ll particularly like.

“Jack…”

“I’m listening.”

“I’m pregnant again.”

The punch to his gut comes immediately, and he feels like he needs to throw up.

“What?” he asks, just in case he heard wrong.

“I'm pregnant again.”

His hand swipes at his face and he pulls the phone away from his ear for a moment, catches his breath and then brings it back to his face.  She’s silent on the other end and he feels like she’s trying to give him a moment to decide what to do, what to say. 

Jack is lost.  He thought she and the unnamed bastard were headed towards disconnection, separation, anything but this.  His mind travels and he gets a brief image of Shanahan fucking Sam, _his_ Sam, and the gag reflex is so real that he makes a sound into the phone.

“Jack –”

“Don't ‘Jack’ me,” his voice is several tones deeper than it was before, and his reaction is proof both to him and to her that what they have, what they are, is so much more than just friends.  Sam doesn’t deflect.

“What do you expect?  He's my husband.”

His teeth grind together so loudly that she can hear it over the miles of signal transmission.  The truth he had forgotten waves itself in front of his face like a flag.  She isn’t his, never was.  He knows this, knows the elementary facts of life – wives have sex with their husbands, and they get pregnant.  His nostrils flare and he takes a few breaths, closes his eyes and wills the nausea to pass.

In her Colorado home, Sam’s eyes moisten because the hurt she’s causing him is palpable.  She wonders at their reasoning for continuing a friendship as deep as theirs when all she can seem to give him is disappointment and betrayal. She hears him take in a deep breath and prepares to hear whatever it is he’s about to say.

“Congratulations,” he voices, still a few octaves away from his regular tone.

“Jack,” she tries.

“Sam, I'm… I'm happy for you, really I am.  But I don’t…” he has to stop, has to breathe, has to take a break.  “I can't keep doing this.”

Her eyes well up instantly; she had a feeling this might happen.

“I know your family is the best thing for you, but…” he can’t finish.

She waits. 

He still can’t finish.

“But what?” she begs.

“But it’s torture for me.”  He hopes she understands what’s coming next.

There are so many streaks of tears on her face and she puts a hand to her mouth to keep from sounding it into the phone.

“I won’t be calling anymore, Carter.”

A moment, a breath.

“I understand,” she whispers.  “I’m sorry.”

Jack nods into the phone and then disconnects.  He doesn’t seem to care that he never said the word goodbye.

Jack stops all contact with her and Sam is heartbroken.  It’s a different feeling than her first pregnancy, where everything was new and joyful and exciting.  She knows what the cramps mean and when exactly the nausea will pass and how to deal with the sudden aversion to smells.  She doesn’t, however, know how to deal with her grief over losing regular communication with her best friend.  She’s not unaware of how inappropriate it is that her husband doesn’t bear that title, carries shame enough to bog her soul down several notches and even Teal’c is bugging her to know what’s got her so down.

Pete, reliably, is over-the-moon about her news and it’s nice, it’s endearing to see that someone who is free to love her actually does.  She’s proud she can make him happy and she promises to herself to try harder, to focus her love on this man who she owes so much to.  Still, when he suggests she take a few years break from work, she remembers the striking differences in his view and understanding of her, and her own.

She goes into work at week 12 of her pregnancy, prepared to officially tell her superiors she’s off the mission list for the next big chunk of months.  It's the same day an offer to be the commander of Atlantis lands on her desk.  She always wanted this assignment, always wanted this kind of command, and the irony of the timing of the offer isn’t lost on her.  She's pregnant and has an 18-month-old at home, so she doesn’t even bring it up with Pete.

She can't be on SG1 or any other front line team, so Landry sticks her in the SGC labs until he can figure out exactly what to do with his resident genius.  True to his word, Jack doesn’t call.  Her stomach rounds and grows and their distance hardens both of their hearts, not towards each other, but toward everything.  She’s a mess inside, emotions colliding and being shoved in deeper by Sam’s own personal punching glove.  When she wakes every day, she puts on her mask, her smile.  She walks through life showing everyone who Samantha Carter should be.  No one knows what battles inside.  No one is the wiser.

In Washington D.C., snow begins to fall.


	12. Torture

Sam’s seven months pregnant when Jack comes in for official business and she can't ignore him because the meeting is with her.  He looks her up and down and while he says, "You are looking well, Carter," his eyes are pained and she feels like crying.  Seeing her full of another man's child is more than he can bear.  He’s been on a good deal of dates with a gal in D.C. and has thankfully had sex twice in the past several weeks.  He tries to think of Carol when he has to look at Sam.  Of course, it doesn’t work.

After the meeting, the room clears and they are left alone, just the two of them.  Sam thinks it’s strange that he doesn’t look rushed or like he’s about to flee.  He’s still looking down at his notes, and he never looks up, never meets her eyes.  She deserves this, she knows, and so she quietly stands and leaves the conference table, waddles out of the room and doesn’t look back to see if he watches her painful exit.

An hour later there’s a light knock at her door and when she slowly turns her enormous stomach, he’s standing in her lab, his hands in the pants pockets of his dress blues. 

“Sir?” she asks.

He nods her way.   “Carter,” he acknowledges.

She tries to stand straighter and it causes her stomach to protrude even further out in front of her.  He looks at it, the round belly, and then down at his shoes.

“How are you doing?” he asks.

It’s awkward enough that she coughs, clears her throat and goes to parade rest. 

“Fine. Yourself?”

“Peachy.”

She nods and continues to look at him.  He’s doing a dance with his eyes from his feet to random areas of her lab.

“Was there something else you needed, Sir?” 

The question causes him to finally look at her, and their eyes meet for the first time in a way they hadn’t during the business of the meeting earlier.  The formality and dismissiveness of her question and use of his honorific is such a clear contrast to the intimacy and familiarity they had before.  They both feel it, like a thick smog that all of a sudden is filling up a room.

“Sir, I'm sorry about—”

“Jack!”  The interruption comes from Daniel, who crashes into the room with a mountain of folders under his arms and glasses that are falling down on his face.  Jack loves Daniel but hates the guy’s absolute worse timing and ability to interrupt every possible important moment he ever had with Carter. 

“Daniel,” he sings out.  “I thought you didn’t wear glasses anymore.”

Daniel pins the glasses back to their perfect spot and squints.  “Really? You just haven’t seen me in a long time.  Actually, you haven’t seen any of us in a long time which is exactly what I wanted to ask you about!”

“What?” Jack asks. 

Daniel finally looks at Sam and sees something he doesn’t like.  “Oh, I’m sorry, was I interrupting something?”

Jack and Sam look at each other, and Sam is the one to say, “no,” in a small and delicate voice that contrasts her large and weighty stomach.

Daniel is still looking between his two friends and he exhales.  “Right, then,” he shakes his head, disappointed in something or someone.  “We’ve having team night tonight, Jack.  You gotta come!”

Jack grimaces and puts his weight on the balls of his feet, ready to come up with any excuse he can find.

“I won’t take no for an answer!  Besides, we’re doing Chinese take-out tonight and I know that’s your favorite.”

Jack acquiesces only because it’s the quickest way to get Daniel to leave him the hell alone and because he mentally catalogues that it’s a Wednesday night and this means Carter won’t come, that she’s on her husband’s time, her family’s time, and that he can put his feet up and have a few beers with Danny, Teal’c, and Mitchell and forget Sam Carter ever walked past him in the first place.  His plans come crashing down when later on, Jack finds out that tonight’s team night is scheduled at Carter’s house, Shanahan’s house.

He has no excuse now, and he had walked out of her lab with Daniel in tow so they never really finished whatever conversation they were going to have in private, and Jack’s a little glad.  He had intended on just seeing how she was doing, asking if she needed anything, but the awkwardness and the interruption had driven him away. 

He drives up to the home that’s written on his directions.  The outside of the house is yellow, and Jack tries to imagine that Sam’s been living in a house that’s painted yellow for all these years.  He’s rethinking the whole thing when a car parks behind him and he’s trapped from leaving altogether.  Daniel and Vala climb out of the car behind him carrying bags of food containers and he figures he ought to go help. 

Daniel opens the front door without knocking and walks in, and Jack remembers being this familiar with his team, remembers the time they would walk into each other’s houses without knocking, without care.  He’s the last to step through and when he does he has to close his eyes to adjust to the lighting inside. 

Teal’c and Cam are already there, and Jack watches as Teal’c stands up to go help Vala open the containers of food.  Cam is sitting on the couch, bouncing a little girl on his knee.  She's blond and has blue eyes, and she's the spitting image of her mother.  He blinks rapidly and his hearts twists in pain, a pang of regret and jealousy.  He looks around the house and it’s immaculate, everything has a place.  There are pictures on the mantle and on the walls of Sam and Pete, of Jenny, and some other people Jack recognizes, the team, Jacob and Mark, Sam's mom.  There a picture of Pete and a female cop Jack can only imagine is his partner. 

When he turns around, he sees Sam coming into the room.  She's wearing jeans and a tight maternity shirt, it looks like she needs to go shopping for the next size up, and Jack swallows at the perfect image of Sam with child, her hips, her rounded protruding stomach, the indentation of her belly button popping out, and large, round breasts.  He has to cough and shift his attention elsewhere.

She thanks him for coming and offers him a seat and a beer.  He accepts both.  When she brings him a beer, she stands in front of him and says in a low voice,

“Pete's not here.  He's on duty.”  He takes the beer from her and nods, thanking her for the proffered information.  He knows she could tell his discomfort and anxiety.  He was waiting for the moment when the man might pop up from behind a door and make Jack wish he never came back to Colorado Springs.

She comes back with a glass of wine and they all sit around the living room, waiting for Vala and Teal’c to sort the food containers.  He looks at her and then at her wine and she smiles and tells him it’s flavored sparkling water and that the use of the wine glass tricks her mind.  She always was smarter than her own brain.

They eat around the living room, in couches and chairs while they chat and joke and Jack finds that he fits right in, is having a good time.  When the food is gone, Mitchell picks up the cartons and throws them away and they watch the end of a basketball game Jack didn’t realize was on.  At one point Carter asks for help dishing out ice cream and since nobody else moves to her aid, he finds himself in her green kitchen watching her take gallons of ice cream out of her freezer.  The kitchen is a mirror of the rest of the house, clean and put together in a way that surprises him.  Carter’s house was always clean and organized, but this is something else, this is precise. 

She opens the cartons and he takes the ice cream scoop from her hands.  Their hands touch and she keeps her grip around the scoop, looks at him until he meets her eyes.

“What do you think of Jenny?” she asks him low enough that no one in the living room can hear her.

Jack looks back at her and watches her swallow.  His hand is still over hers on the scoop.

“She’s beautiful, Carter,” he says sincerely and continues to look at her.  “She’s adorable.  You should be very proud.”

Sam smiles.  For some reason, his reaction, his opinion of her little girl is important to her.  “She’s a handful.”

“Like her mother,” he says, and tugs the scoop away from her hand, turning to the ice cream.

They eat their dessert and watch an episode of the West Wing that Vala insists is the crucial moment in the whole season.  Teal’c comes out from Sam’s hallway empty handed, and Jack had forgotten he’d volunteered to put little miss to sleep.  Jack’s not surprised her team knows and loves Jenny, but he is surprised Teal’c can put a toddler to sleep all by himself.

Jack gets up to go to the restroom and he glances down the hallway to see what other bits of Sam can shock him.  The bathroom, like everything else, is immaculate.  The piece of toilet paper at the dispenser is folded delicately in a triangle, kind of like in a hotel.  Sam must have a really good maid.  When he comes back out, everyone’s gone and he has to wonder how long it actually took him to pee.

“Hey,” she says as she closes the front door.  

“Ah, I should probably…” he points to the door.

“Wait, I wanted to show you something,” she says.  “You got another minute?” 

The guys have left, Jenny is in bed, and she has something to show him in her house.  He really just wants to go.

“Okay,” he says instead.

She walks him through the kitchen and down to the basement, her sanctuary.  He has to stop and really look around because it's a mess, a real dump.  There is stuff everywhere, books open on a coffee table in the middle of the room, blankets and pillows on the couch.  He notices a workbench to the far right of the room, there’s a microscope and odd tools laying haphazardly, a soldering iron hanging from a rod on the wall, and a huge stack of at least twenty yellow legal pads stacked up on the floor near where she is standing, her scribbles and handwriting all over them.  Jack smiles because he’s happy to know she can be normal, can be disorganized.

“Sorry about the mess,” she prefaces, “It's the only place in the whole house that’s only mine.”

“And so… this is what? Rebellion?”

She laughs.  “Gosh, yeah… maybe.  I hadn’t thought about it that way.  Pete's a bit of a clean freak.  I like things clean, put away, sure.  But not like that.  I like a little freedom for my stuff to get messy.  So, I have this.”

He looks around again.  “Things your way.”

“Things my way,” she agrees.

He sees a framed picture on her workbench and he can tell instantly that it’s a picture of her mom.  “I like it,” he says, indicating her own private space.

“Thank you.”

She brings over five or six mead notebooks that look jam-packed with writing and other paper that’s been glued into the pages.  She throws them on the couch and moves her blankets around, makes room for him to sit too.  He sits and gestures for her to show him what it is she’s got.

“Sir,” she says, holding the top two notebooks and looking at him.

“Carter?”

She’s silent a moment, staring at him, but then she takes in a deep breath and flips through the top notebook, opens it to a specific page, then, looks up at him again.  “Sir, I think I’ve figured out how to create a wormhole.”

Jack’s eyebrows arch.  “You _think_ you’ve figured out how to create a wormhole?”

She nods.  “Yes, Sir.”

 “Without a Stargate?”

She nods again, but then tilts her head.  “Not exactly the wormhole we’re used to experiencing, but a magnetic one.”

“A magnetic wormhole?”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t our wormhole already magnetic?”

“The Stargates create a stable wormhole capable of transferring matter through to another dimension… I still can’t figure that one, but I do think we can create a device that can transmit the magnetic field from one point in space to another, through a magnetic wormhole.”

“But it’s not really a wormhole?”

“Well, you’re right.  It’s not a space-time wormhole as we know it or as Einstein suggested.  But it is…  my theory is that the device itself would act like a wormhole, as if the magnetic field was transferred through an extra special dimension.”

“Can you make it work?”

“Well, I think I can.  For a while, we’ve been stumped thinking we don’t have the materials necessary to make any of this work, but that’s not true, not anymore.   If we use Naquadah as a superconductor, it will carry the charged particles and release magnetic field lines from within, distorting them enough to—”

“To make the field invisible during its journey.”

“Exactly.”

“And you figured all of this out down here? During your spare time?”

“No,” she smiles, “I’ve been stuck in the labs at work and then I end up bringing a lot of this home, stuff I don’t really get to work on that much while I’m there…” she rubs at her pregnant stomach as she talks and Jack watches her, mesmerized.  He thinks she looks stunning, that pregnancy makes her more gorgeous than she was before.  It’s a beautiful thing that she’s not only a genius, but that she can fabricate a brand new human while she’s at it and Jack feels like he’s seen and heard enough.  He hates that she’s pregnant, hates that he’s here.  He stands to leave and she notices the change in his attitude.

“Sir?”

“And what do you want?  Funding?” he asks harshly regarding her brilliant new theory.   She doesn’t answer, just stands and her stomach pops out again, mocking him.  “I’ll talk it over and make it happen, Carter.”  He turns and starts towards the stairs.

“Jack,” he hears, and turns around, his hand on the railing.  “I never meant for things to be like this.”

He sighs, moves his hand and body away from the stairs and realizes he’s fleeing like a child does.  He doesn’t want to be like that. 

“I'm sorry,” he says, but he doesn’t know what he's sorry for.  She’s noticed that his discomfort and pain is coming from her belly, from her pregnancy.

“Is this really that hard for you?”

He tries to play dumb but she just lifts her eyebrows at him.

“Yes.”

“Because I'm pregnant?”

He doesn’t answer, he doesn’t want to be _that_ guy.

“Because I’m pregnant,” she repeats so forcefully that it causes him to snap.

“Because… because… Carter,” he says with just as much energy, “it gives me no end of personal joy to see your wants and needs fulfilled.  You're a mother and you are loved.  Jenny is perfect and you have everything that you want.  That's all I've ever wanted for you.”

She was expecting an accusation and she’s shocked by his platitude.

“So why the hell is this hard?” she yells.

“Because it is!” he yells back.

“Why?”

“Because you're having it all without me!” he says louder than he intends, their faces both red. 

Breathless, she squints her eyes and stares at him.  “You didn’t want this!”

“Says who, Carter?” he spits out and immediately regrets it.

She’s frozen and speechless.  He turns and climbs the stairs and makes his way out of her house.  Realization dawns at the suggestion that while he _couldn’t_ give her the things that she wanted, it didn’t mean that he didn’t also want them himself.  His pain makes sense to her now.  His pain is hers now, too.

She’s stunned by his outburst, by hers, by the fact that her sharing her wormhole discovery with the one person she wanted so desperately to share it with was clouded by a truth that hurts so deeply she can’t breathe.  She sits down on her couch and takes slow, deep breaths.  Her baby kicks at her as she kicks at herself for pushing him too far, for making him reveal something she should have realized a long time ago.

She has her life now, and she’s been trying to live it.  Seeing him will set her back but she stands and tries to push through.  She gathers her notebooks and goes to put them away.  When she opens her drawer, she sees the picture of him she keeps hidden, away from everyone.  She pulls it out and rips it in half, lays it on the top of her workbench and turns off the lights.  She climbs the stairs and goes to sit in the room that’s going to be the new nursery.  Pete’s moved her rocking chair in there and she sits on it and glides back and forth, humming and running her hands over the swell of her child as she soothes the new life away from the harsh kicks and back to slumber.  When the nanny walks into her house in the morning, Sam’s still asleep on the chair.


	13. Defiance

Sam doesn’t have time to complete her theories on the magnetic wormhole because her son is born a month early.  Her notes get passed on to Bill Lee and he assures her he won’t make significant headway until she’s finished her maternity leave.  He can sense the project is important to her and doesn’t want to steal her thunder, or as the case may be, her “kawoosh.”  Sam smiles at the man but thinks his joke is a little sad.  She has a feeling she might never work on the project again.

The baby’s early but he’s a full eight pounds and is loud and fussy.  No one can tell quite yet, but it’s obvious to Sam the kid has eyes like his sister’s, eyes like hers, and by the tiny golden fuzz she sees on his head, she can tell he won’t inherit Pete’s brown hair. 

She relishes her time at home and can’t imagine how women manage more than one child on any given day.  After two weeks, she gets the nanny to come back early from her hiatus to play with Jenny for a big chunk of the day so she can focus on her son, so she can feed him and rock him endlessly like she did Jenny.  She felt attached to Jenny immediately when she was born, but with Andrew, she feels even more connected, like he’s her lifeline, her rescue.  Having a son feels significant to her, and she can’t explain why.

 Flowers and gifts arrive from the SGC and from friends far away.  Cassie comes and stays for a long weekend, takes a million photos of the baby with a camera that looks far too expensive for a college girl to own.  Nothing arrives from Jack, but she isn’t surprised. 

She gets called in to Washington and her maternity leave is ending, so she knows it must be something to do with her pending reassignment.  The Ori are toast, Baal is in stasis with the Tok’ra awaiting extraction, Earth is safe.  They need somewhere to stick her and she has a feeling it will have nothing to do with magnetic wormholes.

She’s nervous about seeing him again, she admits to herself, but she can’t bring herself to make a big deal about it.  She has too much to think about and too much to live for now.  She feels like it’s time to grow up and face the music.  She even feels a little fiery, a little determined, a little like the Queen of Sheba.  She doesn’t want any assignment that will take her away from her family and she wants to plant her feet wide in order to get it.  Apparently, the music has to be her tune and no one else’s.  She internalizes that If they can’t give her a little, she’ll just resign.  She knows her value and she knows they can’t lose her and she feels the power of her game. 

Her schedule is handed to her when she arrives at Andrews, a meeting with the head of Homeworld today; then a meeting with the President the next, she had figured as much.

Her flight was long and she has lunch at the mess at the Pentagon before walking up to her meeting.  She goes straight in and checks in with his secretary, who offers her congratulations on the birth of her child and wonders if it’s a boy or a girl.  Sam answers that she had a son, and watches the secretary smile and ask her to sit.  Sam sits but she can see the woman fiddle with some papers behind her; she puts away a pinkish-looking card and then slips a blue one into an envelope that has probably been pre-signed with General O’Neill’s signature.  She thinks it’s cheap and sad that he didn’t at least text one of their friends to find out the sex of her baby rather than signing two different cards probably five minutes before her arrival.  She wonders why he didn’t just sign a gender-indifferent card in the first place.

The secretary’s intercom buzzes and she stands and walks over to Sam and hands her a folder.  “General O’Neill is ready for you, Ma’am.”

“Thank you,” Sam says and picks up her purse, her cover, and the folder and walks toward door.  She knocks sharply and then turns the knob and steps in.

He stands from his spot behind his desk and she quickly sets her purse down on the floor and stands at attention.  “Colonel Samantha Carter, reporting as ordered, Sir.”  She feels like she should salute him but she’s indoors and she doesn’t have to, so she doesn’t.

“At ease,” he says immediately.  “Shut the door, Carter.”

Her eyes scan the room quickly and she turns and does as he says.  The atmosphere feels cold, like their tight friendship was a million years ago and is dead now, buried.  When she turns back to him he’s moved from his desk to a chair on his left.  There’s another chair perpendicular to it and a small round table in between and he gestures for her to have a seat.

“How’s the baby?” he starts off as soon as her butt’s hit the chair.

“Well, thank you,” she answers, opening the folder at her lap and seeing the card his secretary had fiddled with stuck to the left side pocket of her folder.  She touches it and then moves her eyes to the other papers in her folder.  She folds her hands over it in her lap and looks back up at him, waiting for him to begin talking.

“We’re disbanding SG1, Carter,” he gets right to the point.

She knows this already.  Teal’c has been in Dakara for six months and Daniel’s been loaned out to Atlantis since Andrew was born.  She’s aware that they’re having this meeting because they don't know where to stick her.

“Yes, Sir,” she says.  “I guessed as much.”

He nods and she continues to look at him.  He breaks what seems to him to be a cold look from her and invites her to look through her folder.  She licks her lips and pulls out the top sheet on the right side and skims it quickly; they’re orders for her to have command of the Daedalus.

She grimaces and exhales. 

“Not to your satisfaction, Colonel?”

She looks up sharply in displeasure, but then tries to control her features.  “With all due respect, Sir, the assignment is… an honor, but I cannot accept it.”

“It’s the kind of work that’s next for you, Carter.”

“Yes, Sir,” she voices, looking away.  “But the Deadalus is still making large jaunts between Earth and Pegasus.”

“And?”

She bites her lip, angry.  “Permission to speak freely, Sir?”

He throws his own folder down on the small table in front of them.  “Granted,” he says, and Sam notices for the first time how tired he looks.

“Sir, I have a two-and-half year old and a newborn.  The kids are too small, too small to lose a mother,” her voice is firm up to the end when she looks him straight in the eyes and tells him, “I won’t do it.”

He closes his mouth and crosses his legs on the chair.  “I know.”

Her expressions change so quickly that even she can’t follow them.  “Pardon?”

He seems to catch himself and pulls the shutters back down over his emotions.  “So, I’m assuming Atlantis is also a no, then?”

She sees this as sarcasm, his way of pulling himself out of the uncomfortable, so she just stares down at the folder in her lap.

“What about Nevada?” she suggests.

“What?”

“Area 51,” she says.  “Sir,” she tacks on, when she remembers herself.

He blinks, picks his folder back up.  “You can't have Rainer's job, Sam.”

She purses her lips and looks through the rest of her folder, looking for any other option but being on a spaceship, light-years away from her babies.  She’s served the damn Air Force and saved the Earth enough times that they should give a little, make room a little, to fit her needs.  She doesn’t want Rainer’s job, he’s a General in charge of the whole base and Jack knows she wasn’t talking about his job.  Inside, she cracks.

“Not commander of Groom Lake, Sir… just my old job,” the one she had for a while when she was contemplating all the doors in her life. 

“Head of R&D?”

“Yes, Sir.”

He grimaces.

“There's nothing else for me besides being in charge? After all these years, you can't create a position for me that would keep me home and safe and still use my skills?”  Her voice is up several notches and she forgets the honorific altogether.

He’s frozen in his chair and he squints towards her.  “You can’t ask me to do that, Carter.”

“Why not?”

“Well, I didn’t think you had it in you,” he answers honestly.  A request for favoritism from Sam was the last possibility on his list.  It doesn’t mean he doesn’t think she deserves it, needs it in order to psychologically survive, he just never pictured her begging for it.  He wonders how much of the woman he loves is still there.

“Yeah, well, I've changed,” she says on an exhale, fixing a loose hair back in its place on her golden braid.

He doesn’t say anything else, waits for her but she remains mute.  He continues to stare.

“I could work on the magnetic wormho—”

“No,” he interrupts her.  “That was completely out of my hands.  Landry’s already told you that the engineering part of the project’s been passed on to other people.  You know that.  Once they get further in, you’ll be brought back during… experimentation.”

She doesn’t need a lecture and she’s bummed enough that her third baby’s been passed on to a room full of techno-geeks.  She licks her lips and waits.  Jack watchers her and thinks of an alternative.

“I was, uh… thinking of retiring, actually,” Jack reveals to her, seeing her downcast expression.

Her shoulders collapse further and Jack can swear that she humphs.

“Will they let you this time?”

“I'm old, Carter.”

“You said that last time,” she sits further back in her chair, remembering all the different times the two of them have talked about retirement and the feelings it evokes in her.  The word should be forbidden to them.

“Well, I'm a lot older now.”

She looks him up and down.  He doesn’t look any older to her.  “You're not old.”

She thinks he looks as good as he ever did.  She's not sure why they are even talking about him now, and he can see it in her eyes

“If I retire, Hank would have my job and you could have…”

“Hank’s job? Commander of the SGC? Me?”

“You.”

“I can't,” she says rather finally.

“Why not?”

“I'm a Colonel,” she explains to the three-star General who already knows this.

“For now, Carter.”

“They won’t make me a general.  I'm too young.”

He sighs deeply but doesn’t know how else to say it.  “You're not that young, Carter.”

She frowns.

“You're the youngest man ever to be made general and you were fifty-two.”

“And you were made Lieutenant colonel at 37.  That's young,” he gives her tit for tat.

Sam sighs and wants to roll her eyes because the conversation is getting them nowhere.

“If we could…get you Hank's position, even without the necessary promotion, would you take it?”

She bites her lip again and looks down.  “Pete would probably like staying in Colorado.”

“Would _you_ like staying in Colorado?” He doesn’t care one iota about Pete’s wishes.

“It’s not just about me, Jack.”

 He turns sour instantly.  He’s pretty annoyed that she’s started calling him Jack when they’re on an official meeting because it throws him off.  He hadn’t even realized she’d fazed the Sirs out until they were completely gone and he sees the danger of their year of familiarity first hand.

“I'm sorry,” she notices the change.  “It's just complicated.  Pete and I want different things.”

“Since when?” he says harshly.

She looks up.  She doesn’t know the answer to his question.

He becomes extremely angry and he can’t pinpoint the reason why the room has started producing fumes.  Perhaps it’s only happening to him.  The layers of control melt with the heat and he finds the downturn of his face equals the one in his mood.

“You want me to help you out, pull strings… fine,” he collects his papers and stands; she stands also, just two feet from him.  “Tell me the job you want.  Be exact.  Details.  Location, job description, hell, tell me how much you want to make.  Just don’t come at me with this condescending bullshit.  You can't have both, Carter.  You can't have neither.  You have to have something.  I'm delaying your meeting with the President until next week.  Talk it over with your spouse and fly back over in one week.  Dismissed.”

“Jack…”

“Colonel!”

She stands straighter. 

“I said dismissed.”

“Yes, Sir.  Thank you, Sir.”

She quickly gathers her things from his office and moves out, shuts the door.  She’s catching her breath on the other side when she sees his secretary eyeing her warily. 

“Is there anything I can do for you, Colonel?”

“Yes, please,” Sam tries to speak calmly.  “I need to change my transport for today.  My meeting with the President’s been… moved.” 

He’s giving her more leeway than anyone she knows in the Air Force gets and she doesn’t want to take that for granted, doesn’t want to miss the point of his anger, that most soldiers don’t dare say no to an assignment, they _can’t_.  The severity of what she’s just done hits her square in the chest and she’s mortified, embarrassed because she isn’t the Queen of Sheba and her ego and entitlement attitude makes her feel and look like rubbish.  Mothers give birth and then get deployed; fathers leave children behind all the time, the duty of service.  She realizes the request she’s made is a huge favor, trying to explain to herself that she’s done enough for the damn world that she deserves it, as if all the other military men and women don’t. 

She’s able to finish at the Pentagon without losing her composure, but when she’s strapped into the vessel flying her back to Colorado, she closes her eyes tightly and balls her hands into tight fists.  She didn’t have expectations, but today wasn’t at all how she thought it might be.  She’s not like this, doesn’t like the attitude she’s adopted, but she doesn’t feel like she can undo the mess she just made.

Later, when she’s home and breastfeeding a fussy infant, she pulls out the card from his office and his secretary and the day she hated.  She opens it and sure enough, it’s a boy-specific, Congratulations on your newborn card, and his signature is at the bottom of a pre-printed poem that says something about the joys of parenthood.  There’s a gift card for a hundred dollars to a generic baby store that can be found in every town and state in the country, and Sam flings it across the room where it lands somewhere behind Andrew’s light blue crib.

Her sadness is coming from deep in her chest.  She’s made a fool of herself in front of a man she has a great deal of respect for and a deal much more in the scope of hidden emotions.  She misses their contact and she feels like this, like today, has probably made it worse, like he’ll never again look her in the eye, like he’ll never again see her as the woman she once was. 


	14. Mrs. Shanahan

Chapter 14 – Mrs. Shanahan

She arrives at his office the next week much calmer and much more prepared but he's not there.  His secretary lets her in to his private office and she settles in because she doesn’t know how long it will be.  Two hours later and his secretary brings in lunch.  She takes her outer coat off and half eats her tuna sandwich and finishes her diet coke.   She’s sprawled on one of the chairs with her feet propped up on the table and her laptop on her lap, typing away when he finally walks in.  She apologizes, puts the laptop on the table and stands to greet him, but his face lands on her chest and then he looks everywhere but there, coughing uncomfortably.

“Shit,” she says when she looks down too and sees that her breasts are leaking milk, staining her shirt in an embarrassing way.

She turns her back to him.  “Sir, I'm sorry.”

“Don’t worry, Carter,” he sounds concerned.  “Everything… ok?” 

“Yeah, just…” she finds her bag on the floor and digs in it. 

Jack opens the door again and says, “I’m gonna grab us some coffee.  I'll be like… 5 minutes."

“Thank you, Sir.”

When the door clicks shut, Sam quickly takes the breast pads out of her purse and unbuttons her shirt near her breasts.  She can’t believe she didn’t notice, didn’t feel the milk let down, because it’s wet from her bra, past her undershirt, to her uniform shirt and still coming out.  She puts the pads to her leaking nipples, holding them there with pressure.  She wants to kick herself for forgetting the pads in the first place, curses her lack of attention.  Buttoning up, she adds her jacket, which covers the stains, and applies more pressure to her breasts, willing them to stop leaking.

Jack knocks, and Sam can't believe she's made a 3-star general knock on his own office door.  The way she’s presenting herself from last week to this is such a sharp contrast that she has to shake her head.  She wanted a change, to be humble and not proud, and her body did it for her.  He comes in and her cheeks are red with embarrassment.

“All taken care of?” his voice is soft and easy.

“Yes, Sir.  I'm so sorry, Sir.”

He’s still looking at her like he has no idea what just happened.

“I had to stop breastfeeding Andrew since my maternity leave is up.  My body hasn't completely gotten the memo yet… Sir.”

“Ah…” he finally gets it, doesn’t look as mortified as he did before and he gestures for them to sit.  “Does it hurt?”

She grunts.  “It's very uncomfortable… Sir.”

“Sort ‘a like this conversation?”

“Almost, yeah.”

He smiles.

She smiles back.  He hands her a coffee and she’s eternally grateful.  The awkward scene breaks what could have been a very uneasy beginning to their conversation, considering how last week ended.

“So,” he arches his eyebrows.  “Something for me?”

“Yes, Sir.” She turns and easily pulls a sheet of paper from her briefcase and hands it to him.

He takes a while to read it over.  It’s not a complicated order and she wonders what he could be thinking.  He sighs loudly.   

“ _This_ is what you want?”

“Yes, Sir.”

He looks at her and then back at the list.  “Shanahan put you up to this.”

“No, Sir,” she wills herself not to take his comment personally.

“Oh, come on!”

“Our marriage doesn’t work that way, Sir.  He doesn’t tell me what to do.”

“He better not.”

“Excuse me?” Her eyes and forehead furrow but he pretends he’s deaf.

“Alright, let's get back to your plan here… Area 51.  Supervising aerospace technology and the building of our new ships.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“In Nevada?” he asks like he thinks she’s totally lost her brains.

“Yes.  Pete suggested it might be more stable, Sir, and I agree.  Too much trouble comes through the Stargate on a regular basis and working on the projects I suggested there would give me more freedom to have a regular schedule.”

He nods and continues to stare at her paper.

“I have kids now, Sir.  I have to go home at the end of the day, I have to have a life.  You commanded the SGC… you know the schedule.  I realize men and women in the service do not have the opportunity to ask for this kind of concession, and I appreciate the chance to…” she has to stop her babbling because it sounds ridiculous, even to her.  “I’m so sorry about last week, Sir,” she gets out, and lowers her head slightly.  “I was out of line.”

He nods again.  “Life's really changed for you, hasn’t it?”

Sam feels her milk continue to leak and she thinks he has no idea how true his statement really is.  “Yes, Sir, it has.”

“I don’t know if the President will buy this, Carter.”

“You said to bring it to you.”

“I know I did,” he puts the paper down and looks at her.  “I expected you to ask for Hank's job.  Hell, I expected you to ask for my job.  Not this,” he points to the paper at the table, his displeasure evident.

“I know you trained me for command, Sir.”

“I trained you to be the best damn commander on this planet.  You're ready for it.”

“Your confidence in my abilities isn’t the issue here, Sir.”

“Will you quit Sir- _ing_ me, for crying out loud!  It’s like we’re strangers right now.”

She looks at him and swallows.  He made her feel like a freshman recruit last week, and now he wants to hold hands and sing kumbaya.  She has no idea how to proceed. 

He seems to be the only one to think that she’s primed for command.  She wants to bring up Cam Mitchell and the fucked-up chain of command on SG1 for the past two years, and how Landry kept him officially as the CO with nary an explanation or memo to the team, just a head nod Cam’s way.  People have no idea how it made her feel, but she still carries it, still feels it. 

Sam makes a sound.

“Just… say what you want to say,” he tells her.

She relaxes her stance, just a little.

“The last time I came back from maternity leave I could have taken command, but it wasn’t given to me.”

He scratches his forehead and she sees how she isn’t helping her case.

“Right,” she closes the subject.

“Do you want to command an SG team now?” he asks.

“No”

“No?”

“No.  I have a… I just… no.”

“Your request would be an unofficial removal from front-line duty... baring special ‘projects’ we all have to do from time to time throughout the galaxy.  Are you sure that you want that now?  You might actually… I don’t know… miss all the action, miss getting shot at…”

She raises her eyebrows, thinks for a minute.  “Yes… this is my reality now.  I didn’t know if it was the right choice then but it’s the choice now.  They take top priority, Sir.  They have to.”

“I know, Carter!” he says rather loudly, annoyed that she keeps reminding him.

“Then what the hell is this, Sir?  You want me to resign?”

“No!  I want a better option! One that doesn’t have you in a position that's going to bore you half to death.”

She moves her head around and licks her lips.

“I appreciate your concern.  Really, I do.  But… this is a compromise I'm taking.  One I have to take, for the choices I've made,” she pauses and takes a deep breath.  “I'm asking you to back me up before the President.”

Jack looks at her and wants her to realize that her compromise is too much, that her time to shine is now.  He watches her shift her shoulders and grimace and he imagines that she’s still dealing with breasts gone AWOL.  He gets the image of her breasts in his mind, of them leaking and then the picture of him on them, helping her with them, soothing her seeping nipples and of her making sounds into…

“Jack?”

He realizes he’s phased out and he blinks, shakes his head and tries to return to the present.  It’s no wonder Carol never called again.  He can’t understand how his brain can work this way.  No, he corrects himself, it’s not his brain.  It’s his heart.   He’ll do what she wants and protect her because in the end, he wants to and he can.

“Okay,” he says and looks her straight in the eyes. 

“Okay?”

“I’ll tell the President that Nevada is the right place for you.”

“Do _you_ think that Nevada is the right place for me?”  

She doesn’t realize it, but the time to ask for his opinion has passed.  Jack looks at her and realizes that she’s still unsure of what she wants, just like she was three years ago.  She’s lost confidence, she’s lost her keen sense of direction, and Jack is saddened that she’s come to this.  A woman confused, lost, searching.

He looks back at her and says, “No, I don’t.  The right place for you, Samantha Carter, is aboard the Deadalus, commanding a ship through space.  But, I get it, I was there once too,” he pauses, looks down and then looks back up.   “The right place for _Mrs. Shanahan_ is in Nevada, safe from harm.”  He’s even able to say it without a hint of disdain but he sees her face deflate.  He puts her in her place, just like that.

She returns his stare, and she blinks because she can see beyond what he is saying to her.  She nods and swallows, and he finally breaks their eye contact to take some notes on his legal pad and tell her that he’ll work out a plan and brief the President before their meeting on the next day.  When she leaves his office, she touches his shoulder and stops him before she walks out.

“Thank you,” she says and repeats it, “thank you.”

He nods.  “Take care of yourself, Carter.”

“You too, Sir,” she says.  “You too.”

There is so much more she wants to say, so much she wants to bring up, but that relationship is over now, no more intimate revelations, no more heart-to-heart conversations late at night.  She’s not Samantha Carter to him now, not anymore.  His office door closes and she can still hear the way he said “Mrs. Shanahan” and it makes her shake involuntarily.


	15. Continuum

Sam’s hair grows even longer. Her maternity leave ends and she finds herself crying when she feeds Andrew a bottle on the morning of her first day back.  Her transfer orders arrive and she moves with her family to Nevada just in time for Pete to interview with the Lincoln County Sheriff’s department.  He gets a job as a highway patrol officer and he seems okay with the apparent demotion.  He’s getting tired of investigative work and tells Sam he’s happy to take a break from that until her next posting.  Sam’s a little disgusted at him for settling. 

They’re losing her hazard pay and he’s losing his detective’s commission, but they’re still making it out okay; she still makes more than he does and it bothers him, she thinks it always will.  He doesn’t start for another month so he takes the nanny duties until they find one and Sam discovers that every night when she comes home, Pete’s lost a little more of himself each day.  Staying home with the children is clearly not his calling.  He loves them, sure, but he can’t keep his previous maniac-clean-home status and it irks him immensely.  He’s jealous of Sam getting to go to work and they fight about it daily, until Georgina falls into their lap like a gift sent from God.  

She’s the nanny of Sam’s dreams, like Mary Poppins, except Georgina isn’t British.  She actually barely speaks English and can’t make toys pick themselves up with the snap of a finger, but she can make Jenny cackle with laughter and she can put a fussy Andrew to sleep in 3.5 minutes with nary a lullaby sung.  She’s magical, Sam thinks, and she brings a sort of peace and harmony to Sam’s home that’s been missing for a long, long time. 

Exactly a month after Georgina starts, her and Pete make love for the first time since Drew’s birth.  The kid’s more than three months old but they’ve been fighting and irritated and Sam’s feigned a sort of prolonged afterbirth pain that has nothing to do with birthing a baby at all.  Pete’s so quick that she’s left panting, barely started on her own pleasure graph, and he’s sitting up looking down at her, asking her how she wants it.  He means how she wants to finish, with his mouth or his fingers, or a vibrator they keep locked in the top drawer.  She tells him she’s fine, that she doesn’t think she can, and watches him walk off into the shower.

She stares at her ceiling and breathes in and out.  She’s starting to feel unsatisfied again but it’s just the beginning and she should be feeling elated, excited, the high that comes from a new baby and a honeymoon at a new job.  Instead, she feels exhausted, like the move took too much out of her, and that pretending to be okay when she’s not is too much of an effort.  She hears Pete singing in the shower so she reaches for her drawer and pulls out her vibrator.  She closes her eyes and turns the thing on, and when she comes she doesn’t make a sound.  She doesn’t feel how she should feel.  There’s a physical release but nothing else happens.  When her body stops contracting she feels emptier still.

The next morning when she wakes up, Georgina’s in her kitchen with Jenny and they’re making scrambled eggs with homemade salsa.  Pete walks past her and pats her bottom, kisses her on the lips and she finds herself smiling.  It might take time, she thinks to herself, it might take time to find her happiness but she has to try.

sSsSsSsSs

Everyone’s a bit spread throughout the U.S. and the galaxy, but Landry brings everyone in for one last jaunt through the Stargate.  Baal is finally meeting his fate and Landry thinks that bringing the old team back in for the extraction ceremony will do a world of good for them, bring them a sense of closure, of completion.  He tells them before they go that they should feel proud, that it’s a job well done that the last of the Goa’uld are toast. 

Jack and SG3 are already at the new Tok’ra homeworld when she arrives, and she’s unsure about how their meeting will go.  The last time she saw him she had leaking nipples and he pulled favors for her to give her the job she thought she wanted.  

She’s waiting in a sort of antechamber and she looks out at the new Tok’ra world.  It’s the beginnings of a city, magnificent in a way that her dad would have loved. 

“Your dad would have loved this,” she hears from behind her.

She doesn’t move but she smiles because he’s attuned as ever to her thoughts.

“Yeah,” she agrees.  “He would have loved it.”

“It’s quite something,” he adds when he steps up right next to her.

“He said Selmak always dreamed of a day when they would be able to live above ground again.”

He doesn’t answer, just breathes in and out and she can hear him thinking.

“How are you, Sir?” he turns his head and she’s turned her whole body and is looking at him.  Her hair is long and is in a ponytail.  He likes the look, thinks she looks young and sporty and ready for action.  He wonders how long she’s had to grow it out for it to be able to do that.

“I’m okay, Carter.  And yourself?”

She nods, tries to think.  “Adjusting.”

“Groom Lake giving you any trouble?”

“Nah,” she shakes her head.  “Just getting my bearings, Sir.”

He nods but isn’t convinced, and they both hear a Tok’ra calling them to the ceremony.  Two hours later, they are still standing.  Jack yawns audibly and Sam turns to him.

“Never in the history of boredom has one been more bored than I am right now,” Jack whispers to his old team.

They have been there a while, listening as the Tok’ra sing out all of Baal’s crimes throughout the ages.  Jack wonders who the hell kept count and why it even matters at this point.  He yawns again. 

Finally, Baal dies, and he seems a little surprised that nothing happened, like Baal was expecting some secret evil plan to take place.  Jack thinks maybe he forgot to pay his Jaffa.  They watch the slithering snake die on the floor.

“So, lunch anyone? I’m buying,” he says to the whole group.

Carter turns and starts walking with him.  “Actually, Sir, I was hoping we could go over the plans for the new moon base.”

“What new moon base?” He wishes he was playing dumb but he’s not.  He has no idea what it is she’s talking about.   She laughs like she thinks he’s joking and he just shrugs.

He takes them all to Harry’s and they sit around a large table and laugh loudly for a long, long time.  He misses the team and hasn’t seen all of them together in a while, misses the comradery, the friendship, and the respect they all have for each other and for him.  He’s sitting next to Daniel and Teal’c, and Sam’s across the table from him with Vala and Cam, and he finds himself looking at her a lot.  Every time she looks at him and notices, he looks away and she smiles at their game. 

Sam and Vala go to the restroom and Cam starts telling Teal’c a joke, so Daniel whispers at Jack, wondering what he’s doing flirting with her when he’s spent the past six months punching bags at the gym.  He’s talked to Danny about stuff, had to because Daniel is not only a good friend, he’s a nosy friend. 

“Because I’m an idiot,” he tells Daniel.

“She’s not gonna leave Pete,” he whispers back.  “You know that.”

“Daniel,” Jack warns.  He doesn’t want anyone to hear them talking about this.  “We’re just friends.”

“Really? Since when?”

“I don’t know, we never stopped.”

“Jack…”

“Daniel,” he says and the man looks at him and waits.  “Do you still love Sha’re?”

“Yes,” Daniel answers immediately.  “I always will…”

The two men stare at each other and Jack thinks Daniel finally gets it.  He loves Sam no matter how many husbands she has, or how many children, or how many state lines she crosses to get away from him. 

“I’m sorry, Jack.  I had no idea it was that deep.”

“Yeah, well, let’s not get all sappy,” he turns back to the table and tries to re-enter the joke conversation but Daniel touches him on the shoulder.

“Do what you have to do, then,” Daniel tells him.

He looks at his friend and is confused.  “What does that mean?”

“Do what you have to do, Jack.  Be friends… be whatever you can be.”

Jack looks at him and comes a little bit closer, trying to make sure he heard him right.

“Are you telling me—”

“If that’s really how you feel, you should.  If it were Sha’re… I would.”

Jack turns his head, looks in the direction of the bathroom and then back to Daniel.  “It wasn’t…” he has to pause and think about his wording.  “It was hard for me before… and it became unbearable when she was pregnant… seeing her pregnant,” he finished and seeing Daniel’s expression, he knew he had been understood.

“I don’t envy you, Jack.”

“Yeah,” he says.  “As soon as they invent an anti-Carter pill, I’ll be all set.”

“Who’s taking a pill?  You, Muscles?” Vala interrupts sitting next to Jack and staring at Teal’c, who has moved into what was her old seat.  Jack is startled but he looks around and thankfully Carter is several steps behind her and couldn’t have heard.  The only place left for her to sit is next to him, and she takes the seat and smiles at him.

“Thanks again for lunch, Sir,” she says to him, with a lot of meaning.

“My pleasure,” he tells the whole table, but then turns to her.  “Are you staying the night?”

“Yeah,” she tells him.  “I’m staying two whole days to catch up on what Bill and the engineering team have done so far with the Envy project.”  The Envy is what they’ve decided to name Sam’s magnetic wormhole theory, because if they succeed, it will be the envy of every scientist on the planet. 

“They should have called it the Carter project.”

“Ha!” she laughs.  “I did okay it with my C.O… the staying over, I mean.”

He nods, not doubting or caring what she’s doing in Colorado. 

“Are you?” she asks.

“Am I…” he’s forgotten the question and she smiles.

“Are you spending the night?”

His expression changes suddenly because his mind is quite capable of making her innocent question into an invitation. 

“No,” he answers.  “Catching a red eye tonight.”

“Oh,” she nods, reaching over the table to her old seat and retrieving her glass of diet coke.  She sips at it and he decides to tell her what he’s been thinking all day.

“The blond ponytail is nice.”

She stops mid sip and turns her eyes toward him, her mouth still around the straw.  Their eyes meet and she sees that he’s not joking. 

“Are you still mad at me?” she whispers so that only he can hear.

He frowns, because while he was mad at her, furious, he hates that she felt his ire. 

“It’s really hard to stay mad at you, Sam,” he answers honestly. 

She moves away from the glass and they talk, really talk, not about her blond ponytail but about life, about how it’s been, about her work at Groom Lake and his in D.C. and she tells him about Georgina and the homemade tamales that she brings them on Mondays.  She knows he loves tamales.

Teal’c has to go back to Dakara and Vala has a nail appointment so they all stand and get ready to leave.  Daniel says something about a headache and could Jack drive Sam back to the base for him and then suddenly they’re sitting down again at a table, same restaurant, different table, with two cups of coffee and two different varieties of pie. 

They talk about the moon base and he hears her say that she always dreamt of being an astronaut.  He tells her he always dreamt of flying and they both think it’s incredible how life brought them to their paths in the Stargate program.  Next to her, his smell assaults her all afternoon long and she can't decipher what he smells like.  It's _his_ smell, she remembers it clearly from her years with him and from that memorable moment at the parking lot at O’Malley’s.  His smell isn’t cologne, or old spice, or manly muskiness at all.  She thinks of WD-40, and finds that it fits.  He smells like heaven to her, like the can of oil lubricant she uses while tinkering and inventing… the thing she uses for the things she likes to do.  Jack O'Neill, even his smell, fits right into her likes, her preferences, her addictions. 

“Thanks for this… I needed this.”  Under the table, her hand reaches his.

“I needed this too, Sam.”  No one can see him holding her hand, no one needs to.

They look at each other and there is an awareness that what is between them is never going to pass, no matter how hard they try.  Jack’s done trying to stay above the water, and after Daniel’s little speech, he wants her to pull him down so he can drown with her, he doesn’t care how painful it might get.

She realizes there is no such thing as closure.  That those who swear by it are fools.  She'll never close the book on this man, never close the door.  There is no moment where they will settle their feelings and move on, it's simply impossible.  The door will always be ajar, the wind always blowing in.  It's one of those platitudes that just is.  She has no control over it and neither does he.

The next time she's at the home improvement store, she picks up a can of DW-40 and keeps it on her desk downstairs in her lab.  It isn’t his picture, she'd torn that up, but it is a constant reminder of the man whom she wants to give her whole heart to, but can't.  The next time she’s home and Pete wants sex, she agrees immediately and she comes even before he does.  He’s not the reason she does.


	16. And So Say All of Us

It’s September and Sam feels more comfortable in her own skin, both at work and at home.  She’s finished approving several blueprints on a new type of hyper-drive for their next Deadalus-class battlecruiser ship, and she’s suggested calling it the George Hammond.  She thinks of General Hammond, Uncle Hammond, each time she works on the project, and she’s still grieving for the father figures in her life that are gone now, dead.  She doesn’t know when the ship will be built but they continue to work on plans.  The recession has hit hard and the government seems reluctant to spend millions of dollars when Earth appears to be safe.  The Russians are also dragging their feet, unwilling to replace the Korolev when their fancy ship cost so much yet was destroyed so quickly.  Still, she works, plans, invents.  It’s what she does and although she finds great joy in it, it isn’t the euphoria of going through the gate and she finds that she feels a little stale, a little bored, a little under her capacity.

Jack finds he’s at a lull, and he doesn’t talk about it but tries to enjoy the extra time.  He’s been leaving work at 1800 almost daily and that has to be some kind of a record.  He’s even flown Cassie over for a full four days during her long Labor Day weekend and he takes her to Tony’s and to Macy’s and books them each a room at the Gaylord resort, where they float down a lazy river in the middle of the giant hotel and sip drinks by the pool while she talks about college and her classes and the boys that are chasing her.  Jack feels inanely grateful to have Cassie in his life.

He’s been texting with Sam again, and he doesn’t care that he promised not to do that, because as it turns out, he feels more human, more alive, when he has regular contact with her.  He can’t understand it but he feels that maybe it’s just the way things are, the way things should be.  Their connection seems unconditioned by declarations of love.  It’s more of a freakish adult friendship pact, minus the spit handshake and plus a whole truckload of sexual desire.  It’s a weird equation with no real solution.  Like Daniel said, he takes what he can get.

Everyone is still spread far and wide but in January they all gather back in Colorado where it all started, to celebrate Teal’c’s 150th birthday.  Jack has so many jokes about the Jaffa’s age but he narrows it down to three and repeats them over and over again to different people throughout the night.  Harriman’s in charge or organizing it and he picks O’Malleys because he says the SGC has a good bit of history with the owner, the Air Force having paid them off enough times to repair the place and keep things quiet. 

Vala’s made a huge banner that says “Happy 150th Birthday, T!” and because they know no one will think anything of it, a passerby would call it a clever joke, they hang it up and prop some neon-green balloons around the bar.  Vala’s gone all out and bought alien-themed party décor and she’s wearing a hat that has a picture of a Roswell alien on it; all the plates have spaceships in the center. 

Jack’s taking the “we come in peace” cake out of its large box when Sam walks in.  She’s wearing hip-hugger jeans and a nice red top and her hair is pulled back with little clips that sparkle.  He’s thrown off by her beauty and she notices his uncharacteristic clumsiness, so she comes closer and helps him with the cake, lifts it out of the box for him while he moves it out of the way.  When their arms are free from cake and boxes, they look at each other, and Sam is the first to move in, and she hugs him right there in the middle of O’Malley’s, their old team members and SGC staff milling about.  He hugs her back and his hand squeezes the back of her neck.  It’s not a long hug, but it’s significant for them.

Teal’c arrives and loves the fanfare, smiles and laughs a big belly laugh when he opens Sam’s gift to him and it’s a new blu-ray player and the brand-new box-set collection of Wormhole X-treme.  She knows he can’t connect it to a wall in Dakara, so she’s secretly rigged a Naquadah power source into a portable outlet; his head nod shows his immense gratitude.

After dinner, the party thins out but the important people remain.  There’s been a lot of alcohol and an abundance of laughter.  Vala’s made up a game and anytime someone says the word, “really” they have to buy the whole table a shot.  They’re all shocked because no matter how hard they try to avoid it, the word is too common, too used, and Jack seems to be saying it just to get everyone tipsy.  When Daniel almost falls out of his chair, they switch to the word “alien,” and the shots slow down significantly. 

At one point, Jack gets up and goes to sit next to Sam, so they can talk and not have to shout across the table.  The electric energy that sparked when they first hugged has been running through both their veins all night, and Sam’s glad of his nearness.  It’s not accidental the way she’s leaning in closer, not a coincidence when his fingers graze her arm here and there.  She’s switched to Baileys on ice and he’s drinking single malt whiskey and trying to stay above the water.  Each time she laughs and smiles, it pulls him deeper in.  When the rest of the table gets up to play a game of pool, they start talking about more personal things, more dangerous things.

“You were right,” she begins, watching Daniel try to manage a pool cue in his state.  “I’m bored to death in Nevada.”  She doesn’t just mean about the job.

He looks at her and raises his eyebrows.  He doesn’t want to say “ _I told you so”_ because that would just be rude.

“It can’t be that bad,” he settles for that instead.  “Is it?”

She sighs, a big sigh.  “Pete hates Nevada… hates his job.”

Jack looks at her and she’s staring at the creamy liquid in her glass, her eyes a little red from all she’s had to drink today.

“We had a big…” she trails off, deciding if she’s going to say it, but then she looks away from her glass and straight at him and finds that she can trust him, even with this.

“A fight?” he prompts her.

She nods.  “He almost left me… it was bad.”

Jack doesn’t like the guy but to say he isn’t shocked would be a lie.  “What?”

“It was bad,” she says again.  “It was my fault.”

“Sam, what could you have possibly done?”

She waits a second, turns and watches her team at the pool area and then turns back to him.  “I said someone else’s name.”

“What?” he makes no connection to what she’s said and he doesn’t understand.

“In bed,” she clarifies and then looks away.  “I cried out another man’s name.”

Jack has to put his whiskey down and swallow hard.

“Sam…”

“Jack.” He doesn’t know if she is confessing to the name or just saying his.  When she holds his stare, he has his answer.

“I’m not proud,” she states and then looks down.

He still doesn’t have words, not yet.  He doesn’t think she would have told him unless she was this drunk, doesn’t know what to do with the proffered information.  He swipes a hand down his face and then picks his glass back up, downs the rest of his whiskey.

“It was reckless,” he says.  He thinks her telling him is beyond reckless too.

“I know,” she says.  The alcohol is helping and so she takes another long sip. 

This isn’t about him, but he does want to ask if there is going to be an angry Shanahan showing up at his house anytime soon.  “Does he think we’re…”

“I don’t know,” she answers.  “I told him we’re not, I even lied, said it…”  she doesn’t want to have to relive the moment, tell him how the conversation went down when she tried to explain to her husband why that particular name was on her lips at all.  “I’m going straight to hell,” she says instead.

“Take me with you,” he comments, unthinking.

She’s so drunk that she laughs, and he loves the way she laughs.  When she stops, she watches him and he’s staring at her lips.  His eyes move up and meet hers, and they’re both breathing a bit heavy.  They move together, without words, past the group at the pool table and out the side door, where a couple of guys are smoking a pack of cigarettes next to the giant ashtray.  They’re holding hands by the time they reach the parking lot, and it takes two seconds before he shoves her up against a brick wall and kisses her.

She tastes like Irish cream and heaven.

She’s pliant under him, her hands in his hair and up under his shirt and the kiss is so wet and deep that it makes noise but she doesn’t care.  His hands are busy too, first at her face and neck, but then he cups her right breast and she has to break the kiss because it’s the best feeling in the world to have his hands on her, even if there are layers in between.  His lips go down her neck and she can’t help the way her left hand skims the outside of his jeans and she sighs into his ear when she finds hard and large and hot. 

She knows it’s going to end soon, that it has to, and she has only an ounce of clarity left in her drunk brain to realize it, so she moves her head and mouth and captures his again, making sure to remember the taste of his tongue and the way it moves in her mouth.  She forgets about the stopping for a good long while, because the kissing is akin to paradise, until he cups something else, and she moans into his mouth in a way that snaps his reserve and his fingers get firmer over her jeans and she’s sure she’s going to spontaneously combust, right there in the back parking-lot of O’Malley’s.

Suddenly, a siren sounds, and Sam yelps and jumps away from Jack so fast that she scrapes her elbow on the brick enough to make her bleed.  They both turn and watch a police car speed down the street, probably headed toward an emergency.  The sound of the siren disappears but the staunch reminder to Sam of her husband is a slap to the face. 

She covers her face with her hands and he turns, adjusts himself to try to fit more comfortably in his pants and she watches, aware of what they just did, her hands still holding her red cheeks. 

“How drunk are we?” he asks her.

She shakes her head.  “This isn’t the alcohol.  This is a long time coming.”

He doesn’t think anyone is coming tonight. 

“I’m…” he doesn’t want to apologize; he’s not sorry.  He feels like an alcoholic who’s just had a tiny sip of whiskey.  He needs more, he needs the whole bottle.

“It’s time for you to put me in a cab now, Jack.”  He knows she doesn’t mean _with him_ and he understands.

He nods, but then he comes toward her and she looks a little weary because she knows that if he kisses her again she’ll have no self-control left.  Instead, he wraps her in his arms and lays a chaste kiss on her hair.  They walk back inside and she hugs Teal’c, the only one still sober, and then Jack walks her out and they hail two separate cabs.  He waves at her from his cab, and when he puts a hand to his face, he realizes his hand smells like her.  He curses and closes his eyes.


	17. The Things That You Want

Jack knows Pete works Monday nights and he feels undeterred, like a man on a mission.  He hasn’t been able to focus for a week, not now that that he knows she says his name in her bed, not now that he knows how heavy her breast is in his hands, how wet she gets from his kiss, how she tastes and feels after a hard week’s work.  He wonders if Sam and the rat-bastard have reconciled, and he wonders how the hell you can move on in a relationship when one of you has cried out another person’s name in bed.  He doesn’t know what is happening in her marriage, but he knows what he wants to do, and he has to try.  He flies to Nevada on the Monday night a week after Teal’c’s birthday, and he drives his rental car straight to the address that is listed on her personnel information on his computer.  He’s primed, ready to confront her: do or die.

He knocks twice and looks down at himself.  He’s wearing baggy jeans and a light jacket because even though it’s the desert, it gets a little chilly at night.  Sam answers the door and he thanks his lucky stars that he was right and that Pete doesn’t appear to be anywhere behind her.  She’s shocked to see him, her expression almost comical, but then he sees all of her.  She’s in a low-cut tank top with spaghetti straps and tight fitting yoga pants.  She's balancing what can only be Andrew on one hip and holding the door open with the other.  The kid's got sandy blond hair and blue eyes like his sister.  Jack feels oddly proud that neither look a bit like their father.

“What are you doing here?”  Is her greeting.

“I was in town.”

“You were in town?” She repeats disbelievingly.

“Can I come in?”

“Do you really think that's a good idea?”

They stare at each other, just a crash of the eyes.

“I know he's not home,” he says, confident.

“Would you be here if he was home?”

“No.” He says it while still looking deep into her eyes.

She pushes the door open and lets him slide past her, a move of total danger.  She closes the door and walks to her immaculate living room where the miniature Samantha is watching a show with colorful ponies on a large screen T.V.  Jack thinks Pete probably watches football on it and belches after his beer.  She sits on an overly large chair and resumes what Jack assumes she was doing before his arrival.  She leans Andrew down, nestles him in the crook of her left arm, and reaches behind her on the couch cushion.  Magically, a half-drunk bottle of milk appears and she reinserts it into her infant's mouth.  He's a chunky fellow, big now, and he quickly takes over his mom's job of holding the bottle while he drinks down the remains.  Sam reaches down and kisses him on the forehead, runs her hands over his downy blond hair.  Jack is mesmerized by her tenderness.  He sits on the arm of the couch and watches her.

“What are you in town for? Business at the base?” she asks while still looking down at her son.

He cocks his head to the side.  “Not exactly.”

“Then what?”

“I thought we needed to talk,” he says it and watches her head snap up.

“You flew all the way over here to talk?” she watches the truth on his face and looks away, down at her son again and then over to Jenny on the floor.  “You could’ve given me a heads’ up.  I would’ve arranged a sitter.”

“Do you really think that’s a good idea?”

She remembers their last encounter and the lack of restraint and the abundance of need.  “I'd like to think I have some self-control left.”

“That wasn’t an accusation.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” she voices.

He doesn’t need her to say much, just one thing.  “Do you love me?” he asks her.

She's shocked.  She looks at him, then down at her daughter.  She shifts her eyes everywhere, avoiding looking back at him.  On cue, Andrew finishes his bottle and throws it across the room.  The noise of the bottle hitting the opposite wall breaks her frozen state, and she shifts him in her lap and starts tapping roughly on his back.  Jack watches the whole ordeal, impressed as hell that she can do this mothering thing, and without delay the kid lets out a loud belch that would have Teal'c impressed.

"Jenny, c'mon, let's go to bed."  She stands with her son, who is rubbing his half-lidded eyes, and takes her daughter by the hand. 

“I'll be right back,” she says to Jack.

“Okay.”

She disappears down the hall and Jack has to wonder what is about to happen.

When she comes back in, childless, she's angry.

“What the hell is this?” she yells, her hands on her hips.

He stands.  “What?”

“You come in here, to my house, unannounced, and ask me if I love you right in front of my children?!?”

“They're babies!”

“It doesn’t matter, Jack!”

“Do you?”

“What?”

“Do… you… love…me?”  He punctuates each word because it’s the truth he wants tonight.  Her mouth snaps closed and she looks away, looks down and swipes a hand down her face as she feels her pulse quicken.

She goes to the kitchen and he follows her.  She gets out a bottle of wine that looks half full and she doesn’t pour him a glass.  He thinks that her not answering the question is answer enough, but he already knew that coming here.  He already knows that she regrets the door she walked through as much as he does.

She swallows an enormous gulp of wine, closes her eyes and then drinks more.  Half of the glass is gone.  She looks at him but then she has to look away, turns her body toward the sink, puts the glass down and grabs onto the kitchen counter.  It’s confusing to her how his presence can make her skin tingle and her blood grow warm instantly. 

“I wish that you had told me…” she starts, looking down at the counter, her back still to him.  “I wish you had told me back then, what you told me downstairs in my basement in Colorado.  I wish that you had told me what you wanted.  I wish I had told you what I wanted.  I wish that we both had been more honest.  I wish that I hadn’t been full of pride and too afraid to confront you.  I wish that…”  she wants to say that she wishes she could tell him today what she really feels and why, but she simply can’t.

He’s right behind her now, and she lifts her head because she can feel him, but she doesn’t turn around. 

She continues.  “I wish that I had been able to give you what you wanted, to have this future with you.  But we couldn’t,” she turns around and faces him.  “Jack, we still can’t.”

He stares at her, looks all over her face and watches her swallow, sees that her eyes are filled to the brim.  She has to turn away, grab her wine and walk away.

She comes back to the living room and sits down, sips at her wine.  She points to the couch and he sits too.  Her nipples are peaks on her tank top now, and really distracting to Jack.  She notices, and seeing a sweatshirt thrown on the other side of the couch, puts it on.

“Do you ever wonder… why we never did anything in all those 8 years…” she meets his eyes and notices that he knows exactly what she means.   “It was so hard, but we didn’t… not a kiss, not a touch, nothing.”

“Yeah,” his voice is rough, remembering.

“How is it that it took me being married, _married,_ ” she says again, emphasizing the word, “for us to…” to kiss, she means, to fondle each other like horny teenagers in the back parking-lot of a bar.  She can’t exactly say the words out loud because even though the President of the United States might turn a blind eye on her indiscretion, she can’t.  She touches her lips with her fingers and remembers how good it felt.

He’s staring down at the floor because he’s thought about it too.  They’d never broken the rules, not once.  Now they’ve broken more than just frat regs. 

“So… It doesn’t matter what the answer to your question is,” she says rather decidedly and then puts her wine glass down.  “The chain of command is still there… I married Pete.  I have two children with him.  We are miraculously stumbling through our rough patch… and he…” she pauses, blinks heavily, “he forgave me… If he knew you were here…” she looks at him and shakes her head.  “We're not perfect but we do ok.  We get along, we do the family thing well together.  For better or worse this is the life I chose, Jack.  I can’t walk away from this… I can’t do that to him and the kids…”  she pauses, moves her head around, wondering if anything she’s just spouted to him is at all true.

He's silent looking at her because he thinks she isn’t doing Pete any good by staying in the marriage, isn’t doing anything for the kids either, or herself.  She’s not fully in the marriage, not really, but she doesn’t know it.  He thinks she’s afraid. 

He realizes also that Pete is some kind of human he can’t really understand yet at the same time understands completely.  No matter what Sam does, it seems he and Pete are in the same boat, addicted to this woman and unable to turn away or stop clinging to her.  For all his faults, Pete is still fighting for her too, and that has to either stem from idiocy or deep commitment.  In his case, Jack thinks, it’s probably a combination of both.

“Answer the question, Sam,” he pushes, he didn’t come here for platitudes.

She closes her mouth and her head tilts to the side, broken in front of him.

“I love…” she tries, her hand going up to cover her mouth.  She looks away to the coffee table, where a giant picture sits of her and Pete on their wedding day.

Jack doesn’t let that be the end of it.  “You love him so much you have to picture me when he's making love to you?”

She gets up and he does too.  She's ready to slap him across the face, her hand primed for it and he eggs her on. 

“Go ahead, I deserve it…” he says, all anger, and she puts her hand to her mouth instead and is shocked by what she was about to do.  He melts at her face, her eyes wet, and he moves and drags her hand off her mouth and cups it, leans in and kisses her.

His mouth is parted immediately and she kisses him back, her hand clutching at his shirt.  The kiss is loud and sloppy and needy, much like it was the week before, but today it’s more dangerous, today there’s no drunkenness or parking lot or excuse.  It’s just them, wanting each other, and she was definitely wrong before, because she clearly has no self-restraint left.

They fall to the couch and Jack presses her in it, his body hard against her soft and pliant one.  He kisses her long and hard, leaves no room for her to break the kiss, knows she's right there with him because her tongue is as far in his mouth as he can allow and when he thrusts into her on the couch she moans a needy sound that makes him hard instantly.  His hands are everywhere, under her sweatshirt and his mouth has moved to her neck, licking her skin. 

“I love you, Samantha,” he says intently into her ear.  “I'll always love you.”

She's panting and he stops when he kisses up her face and notices that she has tears streaming down from her eyes.  He rubs his face against hers, wiping her tears, and his mouth is back on hers, showing her how much what he just confessed is true.

There are still tears pouring out of her and she whispers between his lips, “I'm not free to love you,” she whispers, but she’s still kissing him, her tongue darting out to lick his lower lip, her hands holding his face to hers.

“I know that,” he murmurs.

“Jack,” she gets out, and he’s on her mouth again, his hands about to reach into her pants.

"Mommy!" they both hear from down the hall.  Sam's eyes bulge and Jack climbs off of her instantly at the fear in her eyes. 

"I can’t find Mickey buddy," they hear a tiny voice say.

Sam scrambles off the couch and is relieved her daughter hadn’t come into the room and seen her like this, seen her under another man, seen her kissing another man.  She puts a hand to her mouth.  "I'll be right there," Sam yells down the hall, shaking.

Jack watches Sam’s face and he knows that it’s over, that it has to end.  They can't keep doing this, he knows she has too much at stake.  Sometimes, the things that you want are not the things you can have.  The pact has to end.

There are tears left on her shocked face and he walks up to her, kisses her gently on the temple and when he tries to pull pack she holds him there, holds him close.

“I have to let you go,” she whispers, “You have to let me go.”

He doesn’t want to.  “I don’t want to,” he says out loud.

She pulls back and looks him in the eyes. 

“Always,” he says to her, and she stands on her tip toes to kiss him one more time, briefly and sweetly on the mouth.  When she pulls back, she pulls all the way back, her whole body takes a step.

“Goodbye, Jack.”

“Goodbye, Sam,” he says.

She's still crying when the door closes.

Two years pass with the blink of an eye.  A lot of things change but one thing is constant, they don’t contact each other, not once, not for two whole years.


	18. The Six O'clock News

Jack still dreams about making sandwiches and he’s been to two different shrinks to talk about it.  They haunt him now, the dreams, and he can’t figure out why they happen and what they mean.  He’s taken to buying books on dream interpretation and watching the science channel specials on the psychology of dreams and the wondrous activities of the subconscious brain.  He hasn’t made any headway, besides one website that suggested a dream about eating a sandwich can mean one is being put through stress and a good deal of pressure.  The information doesn’t help him, because the pressures and stresses in his life are rather obvious and besides, he’s not _eating_ the sandwiches in his dreams, just making them… endlessly.  He also discovers that as it turns out, a lot of people dream about food and seem equally confused about it.  Nonetheless, he’s stopped eating sandwiches altogether.

He’s dreaming one night, not of sandwiches but of Charlie, of his accident, and he awakens in a night sweat, his sheets covered in perspiration and his body shaking slightly.  He hasn’t dreamt about Charlie in two years.  He stumbles down to his kitchen and ignores the middle of the night hour and opens the fridge and takes out an ice-cold beer, downs half of it before stopping.  He screws the cap back on the bottle and puts the bottle back in the fridge, knowing full well that the beer will be flat by the time he gets to it again, which will probably be late.  It’s 0330 and he considers making coffee, taking a shower and going in early.  Older age for him means that if he gets awakened early due to his unusual dreams, he’s unlikely to be able to fall back to sleep.  He’s putting fresh coffee grounds in the machine when the landline rings.  He sighs.  It’s not unusual for this to happen, despite the hour, so he walks his bare feet over and answers the phone before the shrill sound goes off again.

“O’Neill.”

“Jack!”  It’s Daniel’s voice, he recognizes immediately.    

“Daniel, this had better be worth it,” he says gruffly, pretending like the man just woke him, though he doesn’t know why.  He likes Daniel, in general.

“Jack!” Daniel repeats, and Jack finally hears the urgency in the younger man’s voice.

“What!?” Jack yells into the phone.  On the other side, he hears Daniel let out a large breath.

“Okay.  Look, it's important.  Have a cup of coffee and call me back when you aren’t evil incarnate.  It's important.  It’s about Pete.”

“Shanahan?”  Jack slams the lid on the coffee machine and turns the flip to “on.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me now.”

“Jack…”

“What did the slimy bastard do?”

“He's dead, Jack.”

There is a split second where his breathing is suspended.  Jack is silent and so is Daniel and the sound of Jack’s coffeemaker gurgling to life fills the empty, dead space.

“He was killed while on duty, I don’t know, maybe drug-related, I think… I'm not really sure.  He was shot while responding to a domestic violence call, or so Sam was told.”

“Dammit, Daniel,” Jack says while running a hand down his face.

“I know…”

“How’s Sam?”

“She, she… texted me,” Daniel replies.

“She _texted_ you this information?  When?”

“Right now.”

“Have you called her?” Jack asks, exasperated.

“Yes.  She… she’s in rough shape, Jack.”

Jack can’t imagine her reaction, but he’s immediately filled with empathy and dread.

“I'm flying out in 3 hours,” Daniel says.

“Good,” Jack comments.  “That’s really good.”

“Can you come?”

“Daniel…”

“Jack, she needs you.”

“Daniel, I haven’t spoken to Sam in... forever,” he says.  He knows exactly how long.  It’s been over two years.

“Jack, suck up your stupid pride and go comfort her,” Daniel calls him on whatever he perceives his hesitancy to be.

“She won't want me,” Jack tries.

Daniel sighs and shuffles around.  “Fine.  I gotta pack,” he says, annoyed.

“Okay.  Text me when you have an update.”

“I will,” Daniel answers.  For all of his disagreements with how Jack and Sam have handled their lives, Daniel will never keep information this vital from Jack.

“Daniel?”

“What?”

“Thank you,” Jack says with meaning.

“Yeah.  Ok, bye.”

Jack runs upstairs and into his bedroom.  He disconnects his cell phone from the charger on the wall and sees there are two missed calls from Daniel about two minutes apart.  He scrolls through his phone until he finds her number and he idols his thumb over the “send call” button.  He thinks about what he will say to her, thinks about how he feels, and how she must feel, and how awful it is that after everything she’s been through in life, to lose mother and father and all the battles she’s fought, to lose a husband too, the father of her small children.  In the end, he doesn’t hit send, doesn’t call or text.  He thinks Daniel is right, that he is full of pride and chicken and a failure as a friend for not reaching out to her.  But for him, it can’t be tonight.  He showers instead and dresses in his uniform and goes into work.  He thinks about how he was dreaming of Charlie’s accident, of Charlie’s death during this hour, and he’s not a hokey, over-spiritual person, but the thought of being woken up by memories of a tragedy in the midst of another does make the hair on the back of his neck stand up.  There have been too many guns and too many deaths that should never have been.

Twelve hours pass and Daniel calls back with more details.  Not an accidental shooting, not a police officer at the wrong place at the wrong time after all.  Just an angry husband who found Pete in bed with his wife.  Pete Shanahan, for all his saintliness in staying in a marriage when Sam had imagined him to be someone else during sex, was having plenty of extramarital sex of his own.  Daniel tells him that Sam says she didn’t know, but that he’s not exactly convinced.  According to Daniel, Pete’s things are in the guestroom and not the master bedroom, and Daniel doesn’t know how long the man’s been sleeping in there instead of in Sam’s bed.

Jack is angry for her.  His nostrils flare and his breathing becomes noisier on the phone as he hears Daniel explain that he’s going to stay the week until the funeral is over.  Daniel says also, that Sam is having a near panic attack about the upcoming six o’clock news.  Apparently, Sam’s been tipped off that Pete’s shame will be aired as part of the local news cycle, and Sam is mortified that his picture and that of his lover will be across the television screens of all their friends and most of her base personnel that know of his death and will now find out its sordid nature.  Daniel says he’s never seen Sam like this before, her life crumbling at an alarming speed.  Jack tells Daniel that he will personally handle the media and to tell Carter that she can rest assured Pete’s death will not be anywhere near the six o’clock news.  They hang up and he’s still in his office, so he buzzes for one of his aides.

“Get me Julia Donavan on the phone, STAT.”  Jack’s had plenty of contact with the news host that is now famous for having excellent newsbreaks that come from secret, unknown sources.  Jack relies on Julia as much as Julia relies on Jack.  He trusts the woman because she’s never once broken the rules of their agreements or leaked Stargate information to the public. 

The aid rushes off and when Jack speaks to Julia, he explains to her simply that he needs to call in a favor, that she needs to move her contacts to bury a story of a certain Lincoln County Sheriff and the indiscretions that led to his death.  He promises to give her and the stations involved an early leak on an upcoming story, and the deal is made in less than sixty seconds.  Two hours later, Donovan calls him back, telling him that it was harder than she thought it would be because juicy love triangles that lead to multiple deaths are apparently prime-time material.  Nonetheless, she says, the problem is handled.   Jack adds another government leak to her end of the deal as a thank you and texts Daniel the simple words, “tell Sam it’s off the news cycle.”  Still, he wonders who else died besides Pete; the cheating wife or the angry husband.

He wants to call her himself but he doesn’t.  He has a lot of emotions all on his own to deal with, and although he has no idea what to do with any of it, he closes his eyes tightly and wishes for Samantha Carter’s grief to be bearable.  He doesn’t imagine what the next week will hold for him, or the next year.  The sudden coldness that hits at the core adds to the heavy feeling in his stomach when he pauses to process what all has happened today.  Sam’s husband is dead and she is left alone, a widow with two small children. 

He knows that even in this she won’t be helpless, that she is strong, a warrior, a rock.  Still, he wonders how he can support her, how he can help.  The last time he saw her he invaded her family space and confessed he’d always love her.  He remembers the moment and wonders if she still does too.  He feels like a fool, like he can’t even help her now because of that moment, because he’s burned their friendship by introducing love into the mix.  He sighs.  He reaches a point where he feels fuzzy, unable to think, wanting to hide.  It’s an odd feeling for him, and when he gets home, he skips dinner and falls into a fitful sleep.

That night, he dreams of making sandwiches again.  They are tuna this time, on wheat with lettuce, and he makes them all night long, one after the other, slicing them in half when he’s done.


	19. Window

Daniel comes to D.C. for a visit and while he denies that he’s just there to check up on him, Jack knows it’s the real reason.  He doesn’t mind, he misses the man, and Daniel’s updating him on the funeral – the one Jack didn’t attend, couldn’t attend due to unforeseen forces of evil.

While the years have been silent for Sam and Jack as far as communication goes, it’s been active and moving in every other way.  Jack is now the Chief of Staff for the United States Air Force.  As he would say, he’s _the man_ , with a capital everything.  Sam hasn’t been stagnant either, and although she’s still in Nevada, she’s since succeeded in producing a magnetic wormhole through a man-made device they call a Carter-Lee Gate.  She is still the brains behind all of earth's vessels and technology, and she's the commander of The George Hammond, the battlecruiser she dreamed and designed, for six months out of the year, mostly the months where The Hammond is orbiting earth or grounded.  She does some long missions, but though she doesn’t know it, Jack keeps her close to Earth, close to Nevada and her warm little family as much as he possibly can.

 He sends flowers to the funeral and he plans to go, really, he does.  The Russians planting a bomb in Libya during the same day have everything to do with him being in the situation room all day and not in Nevada providing support for his bereaved teammate.  He’s slicing the frozen pizza that he’s taken out of the oven and listening to Daniel talk about how Jack’s absence was felt at the funeral, how he and Cassie and most likely Sam missed him.

“You don’t know that, Danny,” he says while he runs the pizza cutter again through the melted cheese.

“She asked me where you were…” Daniel answers.  “You had told us you were coming and then you were late... I think she was starting to worry something had happened to you too.”

“I did call, Daniel.  It’s not like I _wanted_ to spend the whole day in the sit room with a bunch of idioc—”

“Yeah, yeah...” Daniel comes over and takes two slices from the board and add it to his plate.  “I know it wasn’t your fault.  I told her what happened.”

“And?” Jack asks as he adds pizza to his own plate.

“And what?” Daniel grabs two beers out of the fridge and brings it to the table.

“What did she say?”

Daniel shrugs.  “I don’t remember.”

Jack looks down at his pizza and tries to picture the moment, her reaction.  He doesn’t even know if she was indifferent or disappointed.  He knows he should have asked to speak to her directly that day.  The regrets pile up.

“I can't even put into words why we stopped seeing each other,” Jack says out loud, but by the expression on his face, it’s clear he hadn’t meant to.

“Really? She told me it was because you guys were two seconds away from having sex on her couch while Pete was at work,” Daniel answers, deadpan.

Jack stares straight at Daniel and remembers the day, hadn’t realized Sam had shared those kinds of details with anyone.  Daniel isn’t really anyone, he’s a part of their inner circle, and what she told him is the absolute truth, but still.  He sighs.  “There's that.”

Daniel puts his pizza down and finishes chewing his bite.  

“I told her I loved her that night… pressured her to say it back,” he confesses, remembering.

Daniel continues to chew, continues to watch his friend struggle through.  “Did she?”

“No.  Sam's loyal, in her own way.  She told me she wasn’t free to love me.”

“She's free now,” Daniel says without thinking.

“Is she?”

“Yeah.”

“Look at me.”

Daniel looks up immediately, surprised by the change in voice.  Throughout their back and forth, Jack had been a bit downcast, a bit soft.  His look has changed now, his tone firm.

“There is nothing, absolutely nothing _convenient_ about Sam's husband dying.  Do we understand each other?”

It’s a moment in their friendship that is serious and Daniel see’s the importance, sees what he’s said as a problem to a man like Jack.  He knows Jack’s tried over the years, that he’s come a long way but that he has remained single, remained besotted to this woman whom he loves deeply.  Even if they wanted Sam to walk away from the man, this scenario isn’t one they had wished for.

“Yeah,” Daniel swallows and nods.  “I'm sorry to even suggest it.”

Jacks nods too.  He picks up his pizza and takes his first bite.

“Just promise me you’ll stop being an asshole at one point and call her.”

“Daniel…”

“Jack…”

“She didn’t want me,” Jack says plainly.  “She didn’t.”

Daniel doesn’t miss a beat.  “There is a difference between didn’t want you and couldn’t have you, Jack.”

“Alright,” Jack says gruffly, wanting a different subject.

“No, hear me out.  There has to be difference between convenience and making the best out of a tragic, horrible situation… and with the way he died… the way they had been living, it sounds like things between them had been over for a while.” Daniel takes a break and looks Jack over.  “At one point you guys were friends, really good friends.  All I’m saying is that you think about it – think about reaching out to her.  I know she needs you, Jack… she needs you as a friend again.  She’s always trusted you, more so than me and Teal’c.  You guys share some kind of freak military connection.  Just… please think about it.”

Jack takes in a deep breath and lets it out.  “Yeah… I’ll think about it.”

Daniel nods, drinks his beer.  “Good,” he says.  “That’s good.”

That night, when Daniel’s settled in the guest room and Jack’s lying in bed, he gets out his phone and looks at her name on his screen.  He doesn’t call, doesn’t even compose a text that he doesn’t send, just looks at her name.  He’s avoided thinking of her for a long while.  His heart is accustomed to heartache when it comes to this woman.  Eight years in the field with her, falling for her and not having her, a brief moment when he’d kissed and held her and hoped for her, then watched her marry another man.  A manic period of time where he’d actually danced around the edges of a full-blown affair with her, become her best friend, the man she called when her husband was on duty.  And then, when the temptation had gotten the better of them, the dissolution of any relationship whatsoever.  It had been hard.  It still is. 

He lays in bed and thinks about what Daniel has said and he wonders if she’ll try to contact him first.  He doesn’t want to think ill of her for not doing so, for all he knows, she was still in love with her husband and is in the depths of grief over his loss.  But maybe, just maybe, she’s not.  There are signs the marriage was spooled so thin that the thread was barely hanging on, if at all.  He wonders if she stayed in it for the kids, wonders if they had been headed toward divorce.

Daniel has a point, that while there is nothing convenient about Pete dying, there is wisdom in finding windows of opportunities to make good out of tragedy.  Sometimes, he thinks, windows can save someone’s livelihood and provide hope for their future.  He remembers Charlie’s tragedy, his death, remembers his own grief and depression and how the first trip to the Stargate was a suicide mission in which Jack jumped in, feet first.  He only realized later that the Stargate was his window of hope, providing him with a new life and a new future.  He thinks he wants to be a window for Sam, thinks he wants Sam to be his new window too, out of this daily existence and into some kind of new purpose.  He has no idea what any of his thoughts mean, but he feels a little less lost with Daniel there.  Jack thinks he’s done being alone, done being lonely, done feeling this way.  Convenience is just a word, anyway.


	20. A Penny

Sam’s seeing a therapist but she doesn’t like her.  She makes Sam think about feelings, feelings, feelings, write them down, talk about them out loud, feel them all over again.  She’s tired of her feelings, tired of her actions, tired of herself.  She feels like a damn emotion thesaurus, like she’s her own expert on her demented thoughts and visceral behavior.  She’s re-lived Pete’s death and the past three years of her marriage over and over again and she’s spent, done in.   She feels depleted of anything left when she skips her appointment and goes to sit at a coffee shop that she knows has expensive, frilly coffee.  She wonders if her therapist will think she’s decided to end it.  Before she can laugh at the thought, she remembers the times she’s thought about it, and the reasons she has for remaining alive: Jenny and Drew.  Jenny and Drew.  She repeats their names over and over in her head as a mantra.

She stares out the window and watches the cars drive by as she drinks, tries to relax.  

“Can I sit here?”  Sam turns and a woman is asking to sit at her table, right next to her, right in the middle of her space.  Sam looks around and the coffee shop is empty, seats and tables available everywhere.

“It’s okay to say no if you want some privacy,” the woman speaks again.

“No, no!”  Sam says, though uncomfortably.  “Please, sit where you’d like.”

The woman smiles, pulls the chair back and sits, right there next to Sam.  She’s bought a frilly coffee just like Sam’s, with the foam shaped like a heart and the steam coming up off the coffee.  Sam ignores her a while and turns toward the window.  The woman sips her coffee.

“Mmm, delicious,” the woman murmurs.

Sam turns and smiles awkwardly at her and agrees, “Yeah…”

They watch the cars outside and the people that are walking on the street.  The woman seems to be as quiet, as pensive as Sam, until finally she says,

“A penny for your thoughts?”

Sam turns and looks at her.  Without thinking, she says, “I don’t think they’re worth that much.”

“Oh?”

Sam looks away again, uncomfortable.  

The lady nods and sips again at her coffee.  “You know, our thoughts are always worth something.”

Sam looks at her, really looks.  She’s wearing a button-down shirt that is buttoned all the way to the collar, in an old-school, modest way.  She’s wearing tiny pearls as earrings and simple black slacks and her hair is pristine white, short like a man’s and she’s wearing glasses in a light frame.  On closer observation, Sam doesn't think she looks that old, really, because besides her white hair, her skin isn’t that wrinkled and her face is friendly.  She notices the woman’s hands too, well-manicured, unpainted nails, and on her wedding finger, a simple gold band.

“Do you have a happy marriage?” Sam asks.  She then sits up and realizes the type of question that just came out of her mouth to a perfect stranger at a coffee shop.  “I’m sorry, you don’t have to answer that.”  Sam wants to get up and leave.

“Oh, of course, I don't mind…”  The woman’s eyes go up to the top of her head as if she’s deciding what to answer.  “I do have a very happy marriage,” the woman finally decides.  “Of course, it’s not easy...no marriage is.  And it’s so much work, isn’t it?  But it was a choice I made...a long time ago,” she pauses and sips at her coffee.  “Sometimes I do wonder what my life would have been like without this,” she points to her ring.  “But then again… it’s who I am now.  I’ve learned to be content with it.”

Sam listens to the woman, hangs on her every word.  The words _marriage_ and _choice_ echo in her ears and she wonders about her marriage and her choices.

The woman let’s Sam think a while, let’s her run around in her own brain while she looks out the window too.

“How long have you been together?” Sam asks.

“Next month it will be 43 years,” the woman answers.

“Forty-three years?  Wow,” Sam comments.

“I know.  I was twenty-two.  Just a baby, really, to make the choice to get married.”

Sam nods and they are still again, for a moment.

“How do you know you married the right person?” Sam breaks the silence, and to the woman’s credit, she doesn’t flinch at the question, just pauses to again think of her answer.

“I don’t know the answer to your question, really,” she looks into Sam’s eyes and Sam sees an honesty there, a genuineness that is lacking in the other people in her life.  “I mean, I think it’s a smart question, and I do think my marriage was the right thing for me…”

“But how did you know, before you married him, that he was the right one?”

“There’s no right one or wrong one, not for me.  I had other choices but it just seemed like fate… it was a good match.  I just followed my instincts, lived my life, did the things I liked to do and felt directed to do… and my marriage was the right thing in the end.”

“But how can you be so sure?”

“Well, I guess I can’t be _exactly_ sure.  There are ups and downs, and I have had friends who have left their vows, but for me, it isn’t about the good years or the bad years… it’s the whole package.”

Sam nods but looks displeased with her answer.

“I married the wrong man,” Sam reveals to the stranger.

“Why do you think that?”

Sam takes in a large breath and holds it.  “I don’t just think it.”

“Oh?”

Sam doesn’t answer.

“I don’t see a ring,” the woman questions, “are you recently divorced?”

Sam swallows, hard.  “He’s dead.”

“Oh, my dear, how awful.  ‘He’ the husband or ‘he’ the one that was the right man?”

Sam turns her head.  “How did you know?”

“Well, you said you married the wrong man.  There has to be a right one for you to have realized that.”  She waits a moment.  “I’m right, aren’t I?”

Sam’s about to answer but then one of the coffee shop workers approaches their table with a plate of cookies and a large serving of fruit salad.

“Here you go, Sister.  Fresh from the oven, as promised.”

“Oh, thank you, Stacy. You are always so nice.” 

The waitress leaves and Sam just stares at her companion at the table.  Once the waitress is out of earshot, she asks, “Sister?” Sam demands.  “You’re a nun?”

“Yes,” she drags the plate to the middle of their table.  “You want a cookie?  These are my favorite. They bake them fresh here every time I come in.”  She takes a bite off a cookie and chews. “I can see you feel I’ve deceived you.”

Sam rolls her eyes and looks again out the window, wishing for solitude.  She puts her elbow up on the table and holds her head with her hand for good measure.  “You don’t look like a nun.”

The woman looks down at herself.  “Really?  Well, that’s good,” she laughs.  

“You don’t wear a habit,” Sam clarifies.

 “Oh, no, thank God.  Those dreadful things” she chews some more.  “Very few of us still wear a habit nowadays and none in my order, thank heavens!  We can’t exactly work in the community while looking like penguins,” she answers.

Sam nods but she’s still a little unsure about where the conversation will go now.  She certainly doesn’t want to talk to a nun.  She doesn’t want anything to do with religion, wouldn’t know what to pray even if she wanted to, and she doesn’t.  She feels disappointed also, because the unusual conversation with the stranger turned nun had been oddly comforting to her.

The nun seems undeterred.  “The issue of my marriage is also tricky.  Some people think I’m married to God himself, others think it’s to the church.  I actually have a whole different view of it.  I’m married to my commitment.  Not just one or the other, but to my commitment to be a nun, to serve in this role for the rest of my life.  I don’t know about you...  It doesn't matter who the man was that you married, or that I married… sometimes people stay in it because of the commitment that the marriage symbolizes,” she pauses to take a sip of coffee.  “To me, the thought of leaving it feels like a giant failure.”

Sam wants to agree with the nun, she certainly had those feelings, but she isn’t sure that’s really the root of her issues.  “I still don’t know if it was right to stay in it.”

“Tell me, dear, when did he die?”

Sam sighs.  “Two months and two days ago…the husband, not the ‘right one,’” Sam tacks on to the end, wanting to clarify exactly who died and who didn’t.

For her part, the nun doesn’t move, doesn’t say anything, doesn’t breathe loudly or coddle her.  Just sits there and is present, occupying the same space as Sam.  The quiet and the lack of constant questions about Sam’s feelings are freeing to her.  By this point, Sam’s therapist would have analyzed and asked and discussed to death, but the nun just gives her space, gives her room.  She feels light for the first time in months.

Sam doesn’t realize it, but she eats three cookies and finishes her coffee, eats half of the fruit salad in the nun’s bowl and doesn’t cry once, doesn’t think about feelings at all, just eats, breathes, lives.  It’s the first enjoyable meal she’s had since Pete died, and she can feel her stomach’s gratitude for the nutrition.  Sam’s mind also feels more spacious, like it finally has room to think and not just feel. 

“You know,” the nun says after a while, “I usually come here on Thursdays, around this time… it’s never busy and the cookies are good…”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah… If you ever just wanna show up one of these days, I’ll buy your coffee.”

Sam looks at her and considers the nun’s offer.  She thinks about her Thursday appointments with the feeling-addicted grief therapist and tilts her head, excited about the exit strategy. 

“No pressure about serious conversation or anything… no expectations, just coffee,” the nun emphasizes.

Sam looks down at the table and then back up at the nun.  “Throw in a plate of cookies and you’ve got a deal.”

“Next week, same time,” the nun says, calmly.

“Okay,” Sam nods.  The woman gets up and Sam stops her.

“Wait, I don’t know your name,” Sam asks.

“Penny,” she answers.  “Just call me Penny.”

Sam smiles.  “It’s nice to meet you, Penny.  I’m Sam.”

“I’ll see you soon, Sam.” Penny smiles and then turns and leaves.  Sam notices that she stops at the counter and says goodbye to all the staff, knows them by name.

Sam feels better than she has in months.  The cookies, the fruit, and Penny, Sam thinks, are what give her the fortitude to contact the one person she’s wanted to for years, but didn’t have the strength to.  She hits send before she can backtrack:

_“Pete_ _died_ ,” a self-explanatory text, a conversation opener if she ever had one.  It’s the first thing she’s said to him in two years.  She doesn’t try to dwell on the fact that besides the flowers he sent to the funeral, that he hasn’t reached out and tried to contact her.  Daniel hinted that Jack was still unattached, but she doesn’t want to assume.  Daniel hadn’t known about Kerry Johnson back in the day, and she knows the person that Jack is attracts women not just for looks, but for the whole package.  He’s got brains, and charms, and muscles, but he also has something else, the man has a heart of gold, an unmoving center that grounds people.  She can’t describe him completely, but the word “magnet” comes to mind. 

She doesn’t have to wait a single minute for a reply.

_“I know.  I'm sorry.  Are you okay?”_

She stares at her screen.  Two years and just a few words and she already feels the want and need of being re-connected to him.  Her eyes blur as she continues to look at the tiny words on her phone.  She doesn’t answer for fifteen whole minutes and he pushes the call button.

She picks up on the first ring.

“Carter?”

“Yeah.”  It’s her voice, and she's crying.

“I'm sorry, Carter.”

“I know.”

“Are you alone?” He asks out of concern.

“No,” she says.  “The kids are in bed with me.”

“Okay.”  He’s a little uneasy knowing that she's calling him from her bed.

“They're asleep.”

“How old are they now?”  He asks but he already knows… knows their birthdays by memory.

“Jenny's five.  Andrew's…almost three.  They’re asleep.”

“That's good.”

“They’ve had a hard time sleeping since…”

“Yeah.” Jack can only imagine.  There is a quiet, an awkwardness in the conversation that is evidence of two people who haven’t spoken for far too long.

“I'm surprised your number is still the same,” Sam breaks the quiet.  “I would’ve thought they gave you a new one by now.”

“Nah.  The number'll never change.  They do update my phone really often though.  Takes me a hell of a time to learn the new one.”

She laughs.  “Still pretending to be clueless, I see.”

“You know me.”

They both breathe, relishing the sound of each other’s voices.  Neither pretend not to enjoy it.

“What's it like?” she asks, almost in a whisper.

“The job?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s… It’s not easy, Carter.”

“You never did easy.”

“Yeah.  It’s hard making the decisions that will send men and women out.  It’s hard being the one that makes the call… on a grander scale.”

“I think you're doing a good job,” her voice is light, honest.

“Do you?”

“Well, I don't pretend to know what you do, but the world is still here, Earth is intact.”

She's stopped crying and he's oddly proud that he did this.

“You would do so much better at my job than me,” he says.

She makes an “mmm” sound and he doesn’t know if she's agreeing with him or not.

“What’s gonna happen to me, Jack?”

Her calling him Jack after all these years breaks him a little.  He’s been having other people do the talking with Sam these years, mostly because he couldn’t deal with the hurt he felt, the ache he felt at hearing her voice, seeing her face and not being able to do a damn thing about it.

“What do you mean?” he asks.  “Is this about your bereavement leave ending?”  She’s asked for an extended bereavement and it’s about to be over, he knows the details.

She clears her throat.  “I think I want to leave Nevada.”

Pete's dead.  Jack's not surprised she wants a new gig.

“Okay.  We don’t need to discuss this now.  I can clear more time for you, for you to settle with the kids…”

“No,” she says rather quickly.  She feels a rush of power and the need to get things moving.  “I'd rather get it settled.  I feel… I feel lost.  Like I don’t know what's happening.  Like I don’t know where I'm going…”  Jack hears her voice break and the sound of tears.  He’s seen her cry before, knows her tells and her sounds and the roughness of her voice.

“It's okay, Sam,” he says tenderly.

After a moment, she says, “Jack?”

“Yeah?”

“I… I missed you,” she cries into the phone.

Jack closes his eyes and sucks his lips into his mouth with a ton of pressure.  “I missed you too, Sam,” he answers her.  “I missed you too.”


	21. The Man

A week later and Sam's in DC.  The pentagon looks older than she remembers it being, the paint on the walls less crisp, the bricks outside more worn.  She finds the right office, and it’s a lot different than the previous place she's been to before.  No longer _just_ the head of Homeworld, with a secretary and private office, Jack now has a staff fit for an important diplomat, which is exactly what he is:  Chief of Staff for the U.S. Air Force, in charge of overseeing all commands and all personnel.  Every major decision concerning the Air Force comes across his desk and his opinion is required before every military move. 

Sam steps off the elevator and the room is long, huge, like the kind she expects to see at the White House or at a museum.  There are brown wooden desks on either side of the long walkway, and people are working everywhere, on their desks, typing, talking on the phone, to each other, walking around clutching at papers and laptops and folders that look important.  A pristinely dressed woman appears out of nowhere and greets her. 

“Colonel Carter, welcome, Ma’am.” She says and shakes Sam’s hand.  “If you'll follow me this way, General O’Neill will be with you shortly.”

Sam nods and the woman walks her down the middle of the long isle.  People keep working, some are Air Force uniformed, others are wearing suits, all of them seem consumed with making sure the Air Force is still a well-oiled machine.

They arrive at the end of the room, and the woman ushers Sam into an office, the biggest office she thinks Jack has ever had.  Sam recognizes they have reached their destination but she doesn’t see Jack.

“I'm sorry, I didn’t catch your name?” she says to the woman.

“I'm Peggy, Ma’am, Peggy Ritter.  I'm General O’Neill's chief of staff.”

Sam’s eyebrows go up.  “ _His_ chief of staff?”

“Yes, Ma’am,” Peggy Ritter answers, unfazed, moving behind Jack’s enormous wooden desk and placing a thin sheet of paper neatly in the center of his writing pad.

“Oh.”  Sam runs through it in her head that the Air Force Chief of Staff has his own chief of staff and it adds to the measure of the room, for her.

“He asked me to take good care of you.  Should I have some breakfast sent in, Colonel?”

“No, thank you.”

“Okay.  How about some coffee?  The General is briefing the Secretary on a matter, so it might be another thirty minutes until we see him.”

“The Secretary…?”

“Of State, yes, Ma’am.”

“Ah… coffee sounds wonderful, Peggy.  And please,” she adds, “call me Sam.”

Peggy smiles and leaves and Sam looks around his large office.  It’s immaculately kept, even his desk.  There are no pictures anywhere, none of the personal touches from his previous office.  The door opens again and a steward brings Sam a tray.  He meticulously places it on the center of a table that is between the chairs that face Jack’s desk, then leaves.  Sam looks at the tray, watches the steward exit the office, noting that it’s a full tea tray, with coffee, cream and sugar, and a few pastries on a china plate.  The delicate coffee cup matches the real china coffee server, and Sam’s a little put off by all the changes.  He used to have coffee served in a Styrofoam cup from a percolator down the hall.  The tea tray and the grandeur of his office remind Sam of the dichotomy of their previous lives and that of the present.  Even the coffee, she thinks, tastes grand.

Thirty minutes later, the door opens and in walks Jack O’Neill.  The double doors behind him close, magically.  Thirty exact minutes and complete privacy, Sam notes as she sets her delicate cup down, Peggy Ritter is good.

“Carter,” he says.

“Sir,” she stands.

They look at each other from across the room for a long moment, drinking each other in, noting the changes.  She can’t help the way her heart constricts a little.  He can’t help the way his mouth goes slack, just a bit.

“Your hair,” he says softly, surprised.

She breaks the eye contact and reaches a hand up to touch her hair, pinned up neatly according to regulations.  “Yeah.”  She’s been a brunette now for two whole years.  Two whole years and he hasn’t seen her once.

“I like it.”

“Thank you, Sir.”  She looks back up at him.  Unknown courage makes her feet move, and she walks slowly toward him.  He watches her, notices how thin she looks in her huge uniform.  She reaches him and a hand goes out to him.  He’s unsure what she’s about to do, he's still watching her face.  She goes for his shoulder, touches the stars on his uniform.

“Four stars, Sir,” she says as she looks and traces the stars.  “Congratulations.”

He nods, his throat thick.  Her proximity makes his pulse quicken.  It’s not just that she’s a brunette now, it’s that she’s something else entirely.  Her eyelashes seem thicker, sexier, matching the new hair-do in some sort of magical way.  Jack is entranced.

She smiles then, and Jack can't believe he's waited two whole years for his favorite sight.  It causes creases to appear near his eyes. 

The door bursts open, not the one behind him, but one to the left of Sam and she pulls her hand away from his stars.  She looks over, confused, and wonders how many other doors are hidden around the large office.  She steps further away from him and walks back to her seat.

“I'm sorry to interrupt, General.  It's Barnes, Sir, on line one.  He's says it's urgent.” Peggy says, all business.

“Thank you, Peggy,” Jack walks around his desk.

“Should I,” Sam gestures to the door, the one she came through.

“Nah, have a seat, Carter,” he says to her, and she notices she misses the way he says Carter more than she had realized.  She moves to a couch that is sitting a little further from his desk in order to give him more privacy.

He talks on the phone and she tries not to listen, but the room is silent and he's speaking loudly.  It’s something about Korea, and Supreme Leader Kim, whom Jack is referring to as Kimmy, and a phone call that's supposed to happen later today with President Hayes.  Jack gives his advice to Barnes, right there during the phone call, and the man listens to him as if Jack were the Mother of all wisdom.  His authority is clear in everything he does.  She misses him, his authority, his presence, his voice, more than she can describe.  She's still mulling this over when he hangs up and comes to sit next to her on the couch.

“I'm sorry, Carter.”

“That was Barnes?” she asks, “As in General Barnes?”

“Secretary of Defense, yes.”

“Wow,” she voices her surprise.

“Don't worry,” he shrugs.  “War's not about to break out.  I'd warn you if it were.”

“Gee, thank you, Sir,” she says in gest, tucking a stray hair behind her ear.

When she looks back up, he's watching her.  She looks away and gestures at his office.

“Sir, this is all incredible.  Your work, the respect you have from others, your authority here… I'm so proud of you,” she says with genuine affection.

“Thanks, Sam.  That means a lot to me.”

She smiles again, a smaller smile.

“How are you doing?”

She nods.  “Okay, Sir, thank you for asking.” It’s her standard answer for the question she gets daily.

“No, really, how are you doing?”

She looks up sharply and is glad he’s asked again and called her on her “best behavior” answer because it means he truly cares.  She looks around the room, thinks this is a conversation for after she's had at least two glasses of wine.

He notices her reticence and changes the subject.

“Where are the kids?”

“At home,” she says.  “They, uh, they go to school during the day and I have Georgina full-time now.”

“Good.”

“Yeah.”

“Sir, I was wondering…”

“Carter, you don’t have to ‘Sir’ me anymore.”

She raises her eyebrows.  She absolutely still has to ‘Sir’ him and he knows that just as well as she does.

“What are you wondering?”

She’s wondering what she’s doing here, why she isn’t at Landry’s office which is her usual go-to conference upon completion of any project.  She’s not blind of her skills and knows she’s been on high demand lately.  She’s wondering if she’s finally in this office because the high reason for her absence from it was Pete, and now Pete’s dead.  She doesn’t know who she has to thank for keeping her at Groom Lake for so long but she always had a suspicion, and it’s starting to build again in the back of her mind. 

“Who will make my assignments now?” she asks instead.

“Me.”

She tilts her head.  She’s always discussed her assignments with her C.O. at Groom Lake, and with Landry at Homeworld. 

“I make your assignments, Carter,” he clarifies since she looks so confused.

“Since when?”

“Since… Carter I've always made your assignments.”

Her eyes widen.  “This whole time?”

“Yes.”

Her face flushes and she licks her lips.  “You kept me there? In Nevada?”

“It’s what you wanted.”  He says, his hands clasped in between his legs.

She clears her throat and looks down again.  “Yeah, it was.  Thank you.”

“You're welcome.”

She’s still speechless, and so he leaves her on the couch and gets up, looks around his desk ‘till he finds what he wants, walks back to her.

“I… uh, I took the liberty of making a list,” he says hesitantly.

“Oh?”

“Yeah… after our conversation on the phone last week, when you said you wanted to leave Nevada…”

“Yes?”

“You sounded…” he coughs, unsure of how to word it.  “I just wanted to help so I made a list of positions we… the Air Force, would find acceptable for you to take.”  He hands her the list.  “Unfortunately, it’s not very long.”

She accepts the list, her eyes wide, but she doesn’t look at it.

“You’re at the point in your career where we allow more leeway in personal preference… wouldn’t just give you a new transfer blindly, unless of course it was deemed necessary, but things have been on the cool side lately,” he runs a hand down the back of his head and then back up again and she follows the gesture.  “So, multiple options is standard at this point, just your skills are so honed that it ended up being… well, you’ll see.”

He finally focuses on her and they look into each other’s eyes until Sam has to look away and he does too.  Sam hadn’t exactly decided to bring this up with him, but she guesses it’s now or never:

“Actually, Sir… I uh, was thinking that maybe it’s time for me to retire,” she says shakily.

His head whips up and he looks at her.  “What?”

She swallows at his look, takes in his posture.  He's shocked and she wonders why.

“Sir, you can’t expect me to keep this up now… I'm a single parent, my kids are small…”

“Carter, you're our best asset.  You're the planet's best asset, hell, the whole galaxy…”

“Stop,” she says, looking away. 

He stops speaking and she doesn’t know why his words of accolade are so hurtful.  She closes her eyes and bites her lip.  She has to think of her kids now more than ever and she doesn’t see any way out.

“Are you really, seriously considering retirement?”

“I’ve been thinking it might be best,” she confesses and sighs.

“And do what?” The disappointment in his voice is thick.  He thinks that through all of this, she’s no closer to knowing her true worth or which door to take better than she was before she got married.

She clears her throat.  “I don’t know? Teach.”

“Teach,” he repeats.  “Teach physics?”

“Maybe.”

“The physics you know surpasses anything you could teach,” he says, and she can feel his anger building.

The side door opens again and a different person pops in, a man, smartly dressed.

“Sir, excuse me, Colonel Carter,” he says directly to her, then turns back to Jack.  “Sir, the SGC needs the latest Destiny personnel list.  And Operation Down-feather is still a ‘go’ in one-eighty.” He turns to leave but then pauses, “and Davidson asked me to remind you that the President needs your assessment on the situation in Congo.”

“Thank you, Bryan,” Jack nods, understanding everything the man has said.  Sam’s head is filling, and she’s wondering what is happening to the Destiny and what the situation in Congo has to do with Air Force commitment.  The aid leaves and Sam licks her lips, looks back at Jack and tries to remember what it is they were discussing.

“Can I just… please ask you to think about it?  Read over the list, make any suggestions you think, just… don’t quit now,” Jack says to her.

She hates him for using the word quit.  She's not a quitter and using that word gets straight to her.

He gets up and she does too.  He goes over to his desk and finds a different paper.  On cue, Bryan opens the side door back up and before he can speak Jack holds out the paper for him.

When Bryan snatches the paper and disappears again, Sam sees her opportunity to do the same.

“Thank you for seeing me, Sir,” she says, standing.

“What? Wait, you're not leaving…” his displeasure is palpable.

“I… uh, I'll need to think about it, Sir.”

He stands too and is shocked.  “You haven’t even looked at the list,” he points to the paper she’s clutching.

Sam sits again and looks down, focuses on the paper in her hands.  She squints, annoyed that her age makes it difficult for her to read the letters that seem blurrier every day.  She has glasses, but they are at home.  Jack notices.  He goes around his desk and toward her.

“Here, use mine,” he reaches into his uniform jacket and hands her his glasses and sits down near her.

“You too?”

“For a while now, Carter.”  She takes the delicate frames from his hands.  "It’s not so bad getting old, people actually listen to you for a change.”

She puts them on and can see perfectly.  Then her eyes widen.

“Sir!”

It's not that she's shocked he was able to come up with a list, it’s just that the positions listed are top dog positions, important ones, powerful ones.  “I'm not qualified for these.”

“Like hell you aren’t.  Carter, look at your career.  Look at your brain, for crying out loud,” he says.

She looks down, reads the list again, studies it.  “Commander of the SGC isn’t on here.”

He looks at her and his head tilts to the side.  “Is that what you want to do?”

“Umm, I just thought…”

“That ship has kind ‘a sailed, Sam.  You're up to bigger fish, now.”  She wonders about the other ship, wonders if it has sailed too. 

“I'm not a General,” she says instead, hands him back his glasses.

“You’re a full bird Colonel in the United States Air Force.  You’ve successfully produced a wormhole in a machine you created yourself.”

“Here,” she says when he doesn’t automatically take his glasses.  “Bill helped with that…”

“Barely,” Jack says under his breath.

Sam sucks her lips into her mouth and bears down.  She understands what he means, the success of her wormhole device has landed her in high intellectual circles within the military intelligence community.  She’s more noticed now than she’s ever been before, and she’s not naïve enough to think that if she does stay in the Air Force, that she’ll be in an advisory role like Jack’s well before she blows the candles on her 50th birthday cake.

“You will be a General, one day,” he takes his glasses back.  “Your next promotion review isn’t for a while though.”

She considers his words and takes a deep breath.

“I'm telling you, you can't quit.”

“Stop calling it that,” she says, frustrated, forgetting the Sir altogether.  She hates that word, she isn’t a quitter.

Jack sighs.  “Carter, please, hear me out.  It's time you realized your value.  You used to know it, and you used to trust me.  I'm asking you to trust me now.  I'm glad you've taken time to invest in your family, in your kids.  They're your future, I know that.  I just think that now, though the circumstances leading to this change are… horrible—”

“You mean my husband being murdered.”  She’s not meaning to be cross, she’s only trying for raw honesty, but it’s too much.

His eyebrows go up and he purses his lips, wondering at the dynamics at play within her.  “Yeah.”

Seeing his reaction, she sticks her chin out.

“I think it's time you lived up to your professional potential,” he goes on, seeing the danger.  “I know you, you thrive on work, it might help you get through…”

She doesn’t like the accusation, doesn’t feel comfortable being told what will be best for her and her family.   “You don’t know me anymore,” she says and dares to keep looking at him. 

His eyes dim, like the lights are going out, and she's immediately sorry for being the one that flipped the switch.  She quickly thinks back to what she has said, remembers she’s in an official meeting with her superior.  She can’t believe herself, wondering how to back track, but his posture tells her he’s had enough.

He stands and she is forced to stand too.

He takes a long breath and then his eyes are like steel, cold and lifeless.  “On behalf of the United States Air Force, I offer our deepest heartfelt condolences to you and your family, Colonel.  Please think it over and get back to me at your earliest convenience.”

She sucks in her breath but knows she’s the cause of his icy rhetoric.   “Thank you, Sir,” she whispers.

“You’re dismissed, Colonel,” he says harshly.

“Sir,” she says as she salutes him, biting her tongue, and quickly finds the door she came in through.  She all but runs down the long room, into the elevator that is filled with people.  She tries to take deep breaths and calm her rapidly beating heart.  She exits on the first floor and by the grace of God finds a ladies’ room.  She locks herself in the first stall just as the first of the tears fall down her face, staining her immaculate uniform.  Being unkind was never her way of living and she isn’t sure why she's started now.

She already knows what’s happening, can feel what her therapist would say to her this very minute.  She’s been disrespectful and disrespected in a marriage that she chose to stay in and now it’s the only way she knows how to operate.  She’s become a person she doesn’t want to be and she let herself forget entirely that _this man_ wasn’t a threat to her, didn’t mean harm to her in any way.

Jack sits in his grand chair in his large office and takes short, shallow breaths.  He doesn’t think this will be the last he’ll see of her and he plays back the conversation again, wondering if he pushed too hard.  By the time Peggy comes back in with a new mouth-full of Earth-sized problems, he’s decided that he hasn’t, that he was right to say what he did and that no matter what it takes, he wants to cause Sam to realize how full of purpose she can still be to the Air Force, even with a house full of babies in tow.  He pushes himself out of his chair and gets back to work, undeterred by her animosity, wondering how long it will take for her to contact him again.  He’s a man on a mission, and he doesn’t plan to fail.


	22. Home

Jack opens his front door to find her there.  She's changed from her dress blues, is in jeans and a heavy coat.  He's changed too, is wearing jeans and a NASA t-shirt.  He was more irked than angry earlier in his office, convinced Carter had changed more than he dared to realize, wondering what it was he still loved, a memory, an image of a woman in his head.  For her part, Sam had spent longer than socially acceptable in a Pentagon restroom, then taken a cab to her hotel where she had phoned Georgina, spoken to Jenny and calmed significantly.  She had read the list then, several times, underlining and making arrows and jotting down notes besides each possibility.  She lay on her hotel bed, looking up at the ceiling, wondering what it was that caused her to act the way she did, wondering what Jack must think of her, wondering why she still cared that he does.

“Carter.”

“Sir.”

“I didn’t think you knew where I lived.”

“I didn’t.”

“Mmm.  Come in,” he says calmly, opening the door wide for her. 

She walks in, takes a quick look around, notices that he doesn’t seem as angry at her as he was just a few short hours ago.

“I called Cassie for the address, I hope you don’t mind the intrusion.”

“No intrusion, Carter.”

She stands there awkwardly and he puts his hands into the front pocket of his jeans.  She tries to not follow them.

“Sir…”

“Carter…”

They say at the same time.

“I'm sorry… about earlier.  I shouldn’t have said… I didn’t mean it,” Sam says first.

“Carter, today won't change how I continue to act on your placement… your position.  So… just don’t worry about it,” he says and looks down at his feet, shifts back and forth.

“No,” she reaches out to touch him and he looks down to see her hand on his biceps.  “I…” She tries to speak but finds a lump in her throat, swallows and licks her lips.  “I…”

Jack sighs, watching her painfully try to speak to him.  “Sam…”

Her face crumbles and all he has to do is place a hand to the back of her neck and guide her to him.  It’s easy for him to place her head in the crook of his neck, to gather her body to his with his other arm.  She goes easily, and she cries into his neck, her shoulders shaking.  He shushes her and rubs small circles on her back.  He doesn’t exactly know what she's crying about, if it’s about Pete or the office today, or something else entirely.  It doesn’t matter to him because he's getting to hold her, comfort her.  He's hit smack in the heart with overwhelming relief because this is the Sam he knows, and the realization that he never stopped loving her, not for a single day, not for a single hour steadies him.  She’s everything to him and always has been, her late husband and children and stunted career notwithstanding.  Several minutes later, her crying tapers off and he feels her arms snake around his middle, she hugs him tightly but doesn’t let go.

“You haven’t changed at all,” she says into his neck.  He doesn’t know if she means the way he's comforting her or the way he generally acted today.

He's not sure how to respond, so he goes for comic, "well, there’s more of me to hug, that's for sure."

She doesn’t laugh, and her hands shift, still hugging him.  "No,” she answers him quite seriously.  “You still look fantastic.”

“Trust me, Carter, thirty minutes at the gym isn’t the same as chasing Jaffa for 12 hours a day.”

“Don’t I know it,” she says, and she turns to rest her head on his shoulder.  She doesn’t look inclined to move her position, and Jack's okay with that.

“Pete got fat,” she says rather suddenly and Jack's caught completely off guard.

“What?”

“Pete… he never did much exercise.  At the end, he was doing mostly office work and he… got fat.”

“Oh.”

He rubs her back again and bumps against a bone on her spine.  The fact that he can feel it through her coat worries him.

“You look… thin.”

She doesn’t react other than to say, “I know.”

“I really do like the hair.”

He feels her smile into his shoulder.   “Pete never liked it.  He liked me blonde,” she says.  “I think I did it just to spite him.”

He doesn’t know why she's talking about Pete, but he gets it that she might need to.

“You look… extremely attractive with it,”

He feels her smile again.  “I haven’t really felt that way in years.”

His hand moves from her back and goes to her hair, strokes it away from her face.  There's a pin holding the whole thing up and he finds it, pulls it gently out.  Her hair falls all at once and he smooths it down, runs his fingers through it and hears her hum.  He continues stroking her until finally she loosens her hold around his middle and pulls back, looks him in the eye.  His hand is still at her hair and he gently lowers it.

“I happen to love it,” he says honestly, and he's still talking about her hair.

Her face is red and blotchy, and she looks small and lost.

“C'mon,” is all he says and he pulls her into his house.  He goes to the living room and sits on the couch.  “I was just about to order food… so we can look at the menu together.”

“I didn’t mean to crash your evening.”  After asking Cassie for Jack’s address, she had flat out asked the young girl if she knew if her Uncle Jack would have company in the evenings, Sam being mortified at interrupting a romantic meal or worse.  Cassie had told her that as far as she knew, Jack was as single as he was handsome. 

“Are you kidding?”

She walks in and sits near him on the couch.  It’s a nice sized home, the living room right off the left of the front door, the kitchen open behind it.  Toward the back of the house, beyond the open kitchen, Sam can see a dining area and large windowed double doors leading out to a wooden deck.  Sam imagines there’s a grill back there where Jack burns his steak.  The television is on, a hockey game about to begin.

“You want kung pao chicken?”

She makes a disgusted face and shakes her head.  “No.  Beef.  Something with beef.”

“What? Since when?”

She takes the menu from him and shrugs.  “Pregnancies really screwed me up.”

“Really?” He asks her while he takes his shoes off.  Sam watches, likes being around him here in this setting and not in the grand office with the fancy china.

“Yeah.  I'll have the beef vegetable,” she chooses, folding the menu back up.

“Eight years as a team, never saw you order anything with beef in it, not from a Chinese place.  It used to freak you out.”

“I know… freaking hormones.”  She falls completely back onto the couch and stretches her neck this way and that.

“I didn’t think that kind of thing… was permanent.  Sara ate a ton of weird stuff, but I’m pretty sure she went back to normal afterwards.”

“Well, I never did.” She half smiles.  “And my feet got bigger.”

“Your feet?”

“Yeah, a half-size... and I snore now too.”

He chuckles.  “Are you sure you can blame the pregnancies on that?”

“Uhum, apparently, you're supposed to stop snoring after the birth… I never did.”

“How do you even know you snore?”  He asks, tossing his socks into a pile near the stairs.

Sam's quiet for a bit, tosses the menu on the coffee table.  “Pete always complained about it.”

“Beef it is,” he says standing up and going for the phone.

sSsSsSsSs

He wakes up at 2am to pee and when he goes back to bed he notices a sliver of light filtering in from the hallway.  It's only then that he remembers his evening, remembers that Sam had stayed ‘till almost midnight and how he'd convinced her to just crash in his guest room.  She had agreed, a little too easily, he thinks.  They had kept the conversation light, enjoying mostly the presence of the other and making no demands of words.  He opens the door and sure enough, the lamp is on in Carter's room, the guest room, and the door is open.  He figures she fell asleep with it on and he patters in, big plans of turning it off and maybe covering her with an extra blanket all in his mind.  When he reaches the door, the bed is empty.  He swivels on his feet, ready to walk downstairs and find her, but he stops when he sees her sitting on the seat of the bay window in the main hallway, looking down at the street outside.

“Carter!”

She turns and looks at him.

“Hey, I'm sorry, did I wake you?”

He shakes his head.  “Nah.  You okay?”

He patters over to her and she returns her attention to the window.  Her legs and feet are up, and she’s hugging one leg against her chest.  Her hair is down and the dark locks are still new and unfamiliar to Jack.  To add to it, she has this mussed, uncombed look going and it’s something Jack really, really likes.

“It’s snowing,” she says in a small voice.

“Hmm,” he sounds, “would you look at that.”  He comes over and sits next to her, on the other side of the bay window ledge.  She’s wearing his pajama bottoms and one of his Bart Simpson tee-shirts.  Both of them are huge on her, but even so the image of Samantha Carter wearing his bed clothes does things to him.

“I miss the snow,” she speaks again, her voice small.

“Not much snow in the dessert, huh?”

“Mmm,” she answers.

She turns her face away from the window and starts looking at him instead.  He notices but doesn’t take his eyes off the falling snow outside.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she confesses.

“Does that happen often?”  He does turn now, looks at her.

She nods her head. 

“Do you want some pills?”

“I have some.  They don’t help.”

“Hmm.”

She sighs, looks out the window again.

“Is the car kept on for you all the time? Or only in times of high crisis?”  she remembers all the chatter in his office earlier about the Congo, and the Destiny, and the Secretary of Defense.

“All the time, though they can turn the car off if it’s not too cold.”

“They?”

“Driver, security detail,” he answers.

“You have your own body guard?”

“Mmm, just a guy with a gun,” he downplays.

“Wow.”

“I get called in at all hours, so the car is just part of the job.”

“Yeah.”

She props her other foot up and hugs both of her legs loosely with her arms.  He can tell she's mulling something over in that huge brain of hers.  “What?”

She looks at him.  “It’s just - I never pictured you in this kind of a role.  I mean, I thought you wanted to retire.”

He drums his fingers on his own thighs and puffs his cheeks out.  “Yeah… I did.”

“So, why this?”

“No, I mean I did retire.”

“What?”

He takes a deep breath.   “After… the time I came to Nevada,” he watches her face to make sure she knows which time he means, the time where he pressed her into the cushions of her couch.  She gets it.  “I retired… I went fishing.” He watches her eyes widen and her fingers tighten around the others.  “Two weeks later a motorcade almost ruined the drive up to the cabin to inform me I was needed at operations.  I didn’t have a choice.”

“Jack…”

“After everything happened with the Destiny… well, the President asked me to do this, Air Force Chief of Staff.  He told me it would be my last posting.  He promised.”

Sam’s mouth is slightly open and her forehead in creases.  She closes her mouth long enough to swallow and he watches the array of emotions through her face.

“I'm sorry your retirement was ruined.”

Jack shrugs.  “It’s alright.  It got pretty lonely out there anyway, it wasn’t the right time, I wasn’t in a good place, then.” 

“Because of me?”

He looks up.  “I know why we stopped talking.  I know why…” he sighs, remembering his confession.  “But I'm not going to apologize for being miserable about it.” 

Sam places a hand over her mouth and looks up toward the ceiling, a hopeless attempt to keep her tears at bay.  She hates that she cries at the drop of a hat these days.

He keeps talking because he can see that she can’t, and he has plenty to get off his chest anyway.  “There’s a reason we imposed this distance, the silence… without even discussing it.  We weren’t blind to what could have happened.”  Sam looks out the window again and Jack sees a tear fall all the way down her face, follows its path with his eyes, focuses on her neck and the brown locks of soft hair that frame it.  “We used to only have one regulation keeping us apart.  And then we had two.”  Back then they had vows that strengthened the force-shield by another mile.

He looks back up and she's staring at him, the look of lost and vulnerable on her face. 

“Will you ever forgive me for what I did… what I put you through?”

He looks down and thinks about her question.  He doesn’t think she even knows what all she did and therein lies the problem.  She’s still lost, hasn’t found herself, is still opening and closing doors looking for her fate.  He remembers the meeting earlier in his office, remembers her reaction and decides to plow through.  Nothing ventured, nothing gained.  “You need direction, Sam, not forgiveness for a crime you never committed.”

She lifts a single eyebrow and her expression blanches, her cheeks gone pale.  He notices the rest of her face, scrubbed clean and showing the dark circles under her eyes.  He wonders how many nights she's gone without sleeping longer than a few hours.

“C'mon, let's get you to bed.”  He gets up and holds a hand out to her.  She hesitates for only a moment, but then she takes his hand and she lets him pull her back to the guest room.  He leaves her there by the door and says he’ll be right back, that he wants to read her something. 

When he comes back, she's sitting on the bed on the opposite side of the door.  She looks at him and then gets in the rest of the way, puts her head on the pillow and covers her body with the comforter.  “So… what are you reading me, General?”

He coughs.  “Email from Cassie.”

“Oh!”  She lifts her head, interested, and watches as he shifts the pillow next to her and sits on the bed, his back to the pillow and headboard, plopping his feet on the top of the comforter. 

“Lemme just find it.” He puts on his glasses and starts scrolling through his phone.  “Here it is, are you ready?”

“Yeah,” she answers eagerly.

“The subject of the email reads:  Puppies and Christmas,” Jack says, joy in his voice.

“Oh, dear,” Sam says and he smiles.

" _Hi, Jack._

_I hope all is well with you and that you are still helping to command our dear planet's armed air forces by drinking expensive coffee in your blue suit while you dream about fishing.  No, really, thanks for helping with our democracy_."

“God, when did she stop being our sweet little girl?” Carter interrupts.

“Oh, it gets better, Carter,” Jack smirks and she laughs.

“ _The semester has been okay, we have only had to dissect two animals so far, and I'm glad for it.  I don’t mind dissecting cats, I never really liked cats though I would never tell Sam that, but my heart really does break when I have to dissect a dog.  I know it’s the best thing for my learning, and we all really do learn so much with the hands-on, it’s just so sad_."

“Sad face emoji - I guess you weren’t supposed to hear the cat-hating part, Carter.”

Sam laughs, “It's okay, Sir.”

“ _I guess I have you to thank for my adoration of dogs and my fascination with earthen pets.  I just love them, being around them, being near them just makes me a better person, you know?  When I first started school, I was going to be a doctor, and I know I was doing it to honor Mom.  After the degree at UCLA, Sam helped me a lot with trying to decide what to do next… I thought medical school was the only option for me, but Sam made a list of all my options, helped me find the pros and cons.  Did you know she actually made me map out how I felt about stuff?  Crazy, right?  She said my eyes lit up when I realized I wanted to be a veterinarian.”_

Sam sits up in the bed and adjusts her pillow against the headboard, just like Jack.

“ _I remember we were talking about what I like doing, what I dream about doing in the future, and I knew right away that it wasn’t being a doctor.  Sam asked me to remember a time that I was happy, really happy.  My first thought of course was of both my mothers, but then do you know what popped into my mind? The day you gave me my first puppy.”_

“I remember that day,” Sam adds to the room.  Jack looks at her and smiles, then returns to his reading.

" _I know it’s hard for you when I talk about_ …" Jack pauses and clears his throat, skimming through the rest of the email.

Sam knows what is coming.  Her body has turned now, her face against the pillow on the headboard and she touches his shoulder.  “Read it, Jack.”

He nods.

" _I know it’s hard for you when I talk about Sam, but it broke my heart to see her at the funeral.  She tried to be so brave, and she held it together really well for Jenny and Drew.  She waited for hours as this long line of people came to her and offered their condolences, and I know for a fact that not even a fourth of them even knew Pete.  They were there for her.  She stood there, and I stood next to her, and she hugged each person, thanking them for coming.  I don’t know if each person she hugged was giving her strength or taking it away, but later that night I heard her crying in her bedroom, and it broke my heart.”_

Jack stops reading and turns his head to look at Sam.  Her right hand is covering her mouth, and two clear streaks mark her face.  "Go on," Sam urges him.

“ _So, I was wondering… and please, please think about it.  It's November now and it'll be Sam's first Christmas without Pete.  I'm going to spend Christmas with her and the kids.  Please, Jack, will you come?  I haven’t asked her, and I don’t know whatever happened to you guys but I know at one point you were good friends.  I never told you, but every time I was with them, well, I just don’t think Sam and Pete were ever really happy.  Not the kind of happy I see in Hallmark movies, you know?  I just want her to have a nice Christmas, and I want you to be there_.”

Jack stops reading again and looks up at Sam.  “You okay?”

She wipes at her cheeks and nods.  “Yeah.  Perceptive kid.  Keep reading… please.”

“ _This leads me to request #2.  I want to get Sam a puppy for Christmas_ ,”

At that, Sam does laugh, the sound rough and Jack turns to her and smiles too.

“ _I want her to feel the way I felt that day at the park, when I was a little girl, when you gave me a puppy.  I love Sam (probably as much as I loved both my mothers), and this request is sort of non-negotiable.”_

Sam laughs again, the sound more like a throaty moan amid her tears.  He’s glad Sam has the chance to hear that Cassie loves her like a mother.  Jack thinks it must be a wonderful thing to hear.

“ _I love you, Jack.  Put down that donut and eat an apple._

_Your kid,_

_Cassie.”_

Sam scoots closer to him and looks down on his screen.

“Wow, 'your kid'.”

“Yeah.  She always signs her emails like that.”  He takes his glasses off.  “It’s... nice.”

Sam wipes at her eyes and steadies herself.  “Yeah…what did you reply with?”

“I haven’t yet.”

“Ah. How often does she email you?”

He thinks for a minute.  “Whenever she needs money.”

They both laugh low and long and Sam likes the peaceful feeling that his nearness is bringing her.

“Nah.  She's a good kid.  She does a good job keeping in touch.  Does she email you?”

Sam shakes her head.  “No.  I call her… once a week.”

“Wow, that’s really nice, Carter.”

“Well… she's my kid too.”

“Yeah.”

Sam wipes at her face again.  “Thank you for reading me the email.  I know you didn’t have to.”

“She never… she never shared anything like that before…about you and Pete. I don’t want you to think that she talked about everything… I actually forgot all that was in this email, I just wanted you to hear the part about the list.”

“I don’t think that.  I believe you.”  Sam tells him, looking into his eyes.

“Well, there's wisdom in the list thing.  Cassie’s email is what gave me the idea for your list… of positions.” He looks at her and watches the way she hears him, still appears to trust him.  “You should heed the advice you gave Cassie a long time ago… with the pros and cons and… feelings or whatever the hell you need to do.  Just… promise me you’ll think about it.”

“I will,” she tells him.

He wants to say more, wants to tell her that any option is better than retirement, but he feels like he’s said enough.

“I think you should sleep,” he tells her instead.

“Hmmm.”  It is almost like a groan, as she turns her head from him and stares at the wall.  “I just can’t.”

He understands, knows that trauma and lack of sleep go hand in hand.  “C’mon, lay down.  I'll sit here with you for a while.”

After looking at him again, Sam slides back down on the bed, and Jack clicks the lamp off.  The room is covered in darkness and he stretches out also, on top of her comforter while she’s warm underneath it.  They hear the tick-tock of the clock that’s hanging on the wall.

“So… what kind of dog do you like?”

Sam's laughter is perhaps the best thing he thinks he's heard all year and he can imagine the way her face might look if he could see it.  He likes how he can feel the bed shake from her laughter. 

“Oh, god,” she says still laughing.  “I can’t take care of a dog, I already have two kids…”

Jack laughs too.  “Carter, I have to get you a dog, you heard the kid.”

She shuffles on the bed and he waits for an answer, tries not to move.

“Gosh… well, I do like those little Westies.”

Jack humphs.  “A Westie?  Carter, that's not a dog.”

“Well… it’s the size of a cat, Jack.”

“Touché,” he says, and tries not to squirm when she says his name.

 “They are dogs, just… small ones,” she explains.

“It’s a lap dog.”

“I have small kids…”

“White or black?” he asks.

“Mmm.  I don’t know.  Like the kind that are on the shortbread cookie boxes, you know? Are those white? Or black?”

“I don’t know but all of a sudden cookies sound good.”

Sam laughs again and Jack smiles widely.

“A well-bred West-highland terrier by Christmas,” Jack thinks out loud.  “I think I can find that.”

“Wow, you do love dogs,” Sam comments.

“I love real dogs.  A Westie is a child's play thing.”

“Wait a minute, why don’t _you_ have a dog?” Sam asks, as if just realizing Jack doesn’t, in fact, own one.

“I’m never home, Carter,” he says.  “Dogs need people.”

“Yeah,” Sam answers, it’s the exact reason she was thinking of retiring.  Kids need people too.

“Would you settle for a Bouvier?” Jack asks.

“Is that what you would get if you could have a dog?” she asks.

“I might… though I’d probably get a Lab.  But Bouviers are great with kids, and they are big enough to be good guard dogs too.”

Sam smiles in the dark because even in this, he’s looking out for her.  In the off-chance she might sound stupid, she doesn’t ask what a Bouvier might look like and decides to just look it up instead.  “I’ll think about a Bouvier,” she answers. 

When she makes it home, to Nevada and her kids and the stillness of her house at night, she texts him, a simple text, saying thank you for everything. She saw how busy of a man he is and she doesn’t expect a text back.

" _Will you be able to sleep tonight?_ " his text reads.

She looks down and sees her children on either side of her on her king-size bed.  " _Don't know,_ " she texts honestly, " _the kids in bed with me again."_

She waits a moment, wondering if that will be the end of it.

She smiles a little when she hears the ding.  " _Does that hurt or help?"_

" _It helps…_ " she types, " _unless Drew kicks me in the face in the middle of the night._ "

He responds with an emoji, a collection of punctuation marks creating a face with its tongue sticking out.  And then, “ _have you googled what a Bouvier is yet?”_

She smiles, a huge smile which bares all her teeth and makes her giggle in her bed.  “ _You do still know me well,”_ she braves saying, a contrast to what she said to his face earlier in the week.  “ _I think a Bouvier will be perfect for me,”_ she texts also.

“ _Cassie will be ecstatic.”_

“ _Thank you.”_

She doesn’t know what else to say so she lets the conversation die until she hears one last bing.

" _I'm always here if you need to talk_."

She considers that for a moment, feels a tightness in her chest and the nervousness that comes with the blooming of things that are new.

" _I'll remember that_ ," she types back

“ _Sleep tight, Sam.”_

She puts down her phone and the fast beating of her heart definitely signals that whatever lay dormant between them is reawakening within her faster than she expected.


	23. Doors

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay, caught a morning with my laptop so here is an update, not beta-ed. xoxo

Sam walks into the coffee shop the following Thursday and Penny is already sitting at a table.  She smiles widely and waves Sam over.  Sam lifts her hand and waves back and notices a plate of cookies is already in front of Penny.  Sam walks over and puts her purse down, tells Penny she’ll be right back, that she has to order her coffee.  The nun catches her hand and puts a five-dollar bill in it.

“No, you don’t have to do that,” Sam says, trying to hand back the money.

“I told you I would!  It was part of the deal!  Go on, get your coffee!” Penny gestures to the counter.  Sam smiles and doesn’t want to offend her for her kindness, so she takes the money and goes to order.  She comes back a minute later with a mug, sits down next to Penny.  A bird is sitting on the other side of the window and they watch it together.

“Thank you again for the coffee,” Sam says, “should I call you Sister Penny?” Sam asks, uncertain.

“Most of my friends just call me Penny.  Unless you’re a Catholic and feel weird about it, then you can call me Sister or whatever you’d like,” Penny says, taking the change from Sam and putting it on the other side of the table.

Sam smiles.  “I guess I was Catholic… by tradition, but I’m not anything anymore.”

“Then it’s settled.  Tell me, Sam, what do you do for a living?”

Sam grimaces, she can’t exactly tell a nun or anyone in this coffee shop that she builds spaceships for all the wars they fight with the aliens and enemies in this galaxy and beyond.  “I’m a Colonel in the Air Force,” she says instead.  “And a scientist… I develop new technology and ensure that all our air crafts are… appropriately updated.”

Penny’s eyes are huge.  “You’re kidding!  At Area 51?”

Sam smiles.  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Penny.” The locals tell visitors that Area 51 is a myth.  “I work at Groom Lake, of course.”  Sam winks at her for good measure.

Penny smiles and leans in conspiratorially.  “You know, I saw a space ship once.”

Sam actually laughs out loud and Penny brings the plate of cookies closer.  Sam notices there are a few savory breads on it too.  She picks one and starts to eat, and Penny goes straight for a cookie.  They’re quiet while they eat, and they both look out the window and watch the wind as it blows dust bundles down the street.  The bird flies away and Sam feels a pang of jealousy for the bird’s freedom to go where it wills.

“There was a coffee shop like this when I was growing up.  They sold pies and pastries and had the best cookies and my mother would always buy me one,” Penny tells her.  “I hated when the snow got so heavy because we couldn’t walk to the shop.  I longed for the Spring again so we could walk together and get cookies.  We’d sit at a table and she’d let me count the change on the white Formica,” Penny finishes, and Sam watches as Penny touches the coins from her change and moves them this way and that.

“Where was the heavy snow?”  Sam asks.

“Minnesota.”

Sam’s eyebrows raise and she actually chuckles.  “You grew up in Minnesota?”

“Yes.  Did you?!” Penny asks, rather excited.

Sam shakes her head.  “Jack did.”

Penny raises her eyebrows in question.

Sam answers, “the right one.”  She feels her declaration deep down in her soul.

“Ah,” Penny nods.  “No wonder he’s the right one!”

Sam smiles and laughs again and Penny tells Sam about growing up in Minnesota, about the heavy snow and about her seven siblings.  “Do you have any siblings?”

Sam tells her about Mark, about their distance and her mom dying, about her growing up with a military dad.  She tacks on about Jacob’s death, and Penny just listens and nods and Sam likes that she doesn’t push. 

“Jack was my commanding officer for eight years,” Sam says out of nowhere, “and I fell in love with him by the end of our first year going through the… working together.”

Penny sips at her coffee and looks on expectantly.  Sam continues, and word for word she recounts her story with him, relives the good moments, explains the limitations to the feasibility of any relationship and their ability to hold back, to stay away, to cope.  She even mentions the sexual tension and the emotional detriment to herself of the inability to express her love, the personal cost of loving someone when it was illicit to do so.  She tells Penny about Pete, about the novelty of being open in love, tells her of his romance and her need to have a family and have a life outside of work.  She doesn’t cry when she tells Penny about Jenny and about Drew, smiles when she talks about how motherhood has been gratifying to her but also a little lonely.  She’d shared it with a less-than-ideal partner, one she didn’t truly love, but the only one she felt she could have.  She tappers off when she talks about the night at O’Malley’s where Jack kissed her against a wall outside of a bar.

“You won’t shock me with any information, Sam.  I may be a nun but I’m also a woman and in my 60’s.  I have feelings like every other human in the world.”

Sam nods and is glad of the self-disclosure and of Penny’s invitation.  There are certain details she hasn’t been able to tell anyone.  She takes in a deep breath and when she blows it out she also reveals the downward spiral of her shame.  She tells Penny that her and Jack became more emotionally involved than her and Pete ever were, that she dreamt of him and wanted him physically instead of Pete, and that on several occasions Sam tasted what it would be like to be with him, though never completely.  She tells Penny of the height of contrast between her response to Pete and her response to Jack, how one could never compare to the other.  She describes the disintegration of her marriage, bit by bit, how she and Pete eventually couldn’t even touch each other without the mockery of the reality of the obvious misplacement of her heart.  Pete had known she wasn’t completely his, and he’d given up on any pretense by the time their son blew the candles out on his first birthday cake.  She tells Penny that she stayed in the failed marriage because she couldn’t imagine herself pulling out, failing herself and her children and the picture she had painted years ago of happiness.  The watercolors started to blur together, the water running too thick, the picture distorted and ugly.  Still, she couldn’t walk away from it.  Finally, she speaks the words, tells Penny that Pete was shot to death when he was caught in bed with another man’s wife. 

“You must think the worst of me,” Sam says.

“Sounds like you already think the worst of yourself for both of us.”

Penny watches the street traffic and Sam feels herself saying more.  “Sometimes I feel like every decision I’ve made has been the wrong one.”

“You don’t think that’s a bit harsh?  You’ve been through the woods, for crying out loud!”

Sam purses her lips and wonders what Penny must mean, thinks of Jack saying those last words with the snark in his voice and she finds herself longing to hear it.  She really likes Minnesotans, she decides.  A young man wearing a bowtie and carrying a bouquet of flowers walks by and Sam follows him through the window, down the street until he disappears behind another building, and then Penny begins to speak. 

“You know… sometimes, despite our best hopes and intentions, life’s circumstances can conspire to convince us that we are unimportant, unloved, even useless, and that we were the ones that got ourselves there, by the choices we made.  Sometimes these perceptions are pressed on us by other people or outside forces, but sometimes, they are self-imposed… and life can collapse around us.  Broken promises, unfulfilled dreams and soured relationships can litter our landscapes.  We may even lose ourselves in the rubble.”  Sam looks on as Penny talks, amazed that she can have such depth of understanding.  “Is there any way that you can let this not be about you?”

“What?”

“This idea that your life’s direction and some of the crumbling pieces are all part of some grand misstep you took.  _That_.  Is there any way that you can look at it differently?  That you can make it not about you?”

Sam is stunned by her question and she doesn’t know the answer.  It absolutely is about her.  She has no idea if she can make it _not_ about her, but she likes the idea of thinking about it with a new perspective.  She has no idea how to process it, period.

“It _is_ about me.  It’s _my_ fault.”

Penny looks at her and nods. 

“Penny,” Sam asks, changing the subject, “besides being a nun, what is it that you do for a living?” She remembers something about her working in the community.

“I’m a professional spiritual adviser,” Penny answers easily, “I work out of the Multi-faith Alliance of Counselors in Lincoln County.”

Sam blinks.

“Our office is just next door,” Penny points.

Sam licks her lips and actually feels some of her tension dissipating.  “You should know I’m here because I’m running away from my counseling session with my grief therapist,” she confesses. 

“Oh-uh,” Penny looks around, “I hope he or she doesn’t see us and get mad at me.”

Sam laughs but is relieved she’s talking to someone with some sort of training.  She feels wonderful, actually.  “I’ve told you I’m not spiritual,” she decides to say. 

“I understand that, no problem.” Penny sips her coffee.  “But I’d offer that you aren’t religious.  To me, there is a big difference between religion and spirituality.  Spirituality has to do with finding meaning and purpose in your life, in the experiences you’ve had and in your world view.  It’s about finding significance in the things in our lives.  I happen to think you’re doing that right now.  And I think you’re doing just fine, by the way.  Of course, I have no idea what your grief counselor’s been telling you, but from the little I’ve heard, well… I’m proud of you.”

Sam’s mouth is open and besides being stunned, she’s curious.  “She talks a lot about feelings… and self-care.”

“Oh?”

“She says, like you, I’m too harsh on myself, that I don’t love myself, don’t allow myself to relax, to have fun, to rest my heart and my mind.”

Penny arches her eyebrows.  “Do you agree?”

Sam shrugs.  “I can’t go on a vacation or quit my job or ask for any additional leave, Penny.  I have a family, by myself now… I have responsibilities and bills to pay and… I can’t afford self-care.”

“Mmm,” Penny voices.

Sam’s look invites Penny to speak.

“So, the picture of self-care that she painted for you, was…”

“Investing time in myself, taking care of myself…” Sam elaborates.

Penny nods.  “Sometimes, Sam, self-care doesn’t mean lying on a blanket on a meadow… or getting your nails done.  I mean, who has time for that?  Sometimes, self-care means getting up in the morning, paying your bills, making sure there’s milk in the fridge for the kids and that you’re prepared for the next meeting at work.  Self-care can even mean you skip a counseling session to eat cookies at a coffee shop to clear your mind.” Sam looks at Penny and realizes that what the nun is saying is true.  “You’re doing the only self-care that you can right now.  Sam, you’re doing it _now_.”

“But…”

Penny sneezes and Sam offers her a tissue from her purse.  Penny waits but Sam never elaborates on what it is she’s thinking.

“Your grief is worse because of all your guilt, Sam.” Penny offers after a long while.  “Maybe the self-care that you’re already doing would be helped by figuring out how to make peace with the reason you walked through that particular door all those years ago.  Own it.  Sure, it’s difficult in life to know which decision is the right one, but even when we make a misstep, it’s not the end of the world… we can make good out of the wrong door too.”

“Doors…”

“Pete is dead now.  You can close it and open another.”

Sam looks up and considers all her self-loathing, remembers the things her therapist has said to her and realizes they are probably true.  She recognizes the desire to fade into the background of life and avoid notice, to resign the Air Force or take an inferior assignment as a means to her denial, her flight.  She’s been avoiding familiar places, friends, activities… grief, Penny told her, and guilt.

“Let it go, Sam.”

Sam leans back on her chair, her look blank.  She briefly closes her eyes and lets out a deliberately quiet exhale.  For all of her silence the first day, Penny’s had plenty to say today, and Sam feels like Penny validates her in a way her grief counselor never has.  She feels also an enormous urge to talk to Jack, to get his take on the direction he so strongly feels she needs.  She doesn’t know if he’s a door but she thinks he holds the key.  When she opens her eyes back up, Penny is smiling.  Before Sam leaves, they exchange business cards and Penny writes in her personal cell phone number, the one not on her business card, so that Sam can call her any time. 

Sam does just that.


	24. Eye to Eye

A week later, Sam and Jack have a scheduled video call.  It's official business, and he's in his office, in his dress blues.  She's at home in her bedroom, at the makeshift desk she uses as an office, and she's wearing a pale blue sweater that makes her eyes look alive, even if they aren’t.  He arranged for the meeting to be this way so that she wouldn’t have to fly out again; he knows for a fact it was a huge hurdle for her to come to D.C. last week.  He can't exactly leave for a day trip to Nevada right now, not when the Russians are at odds with Libya.

“So… do you have any news for me?”  He says after they exchange a few pleasantries.

She holds her breath.  “Actually, Sir, I wondered if we could talk through some of these options and you could… advise me.”  She stops and looks straight through the computer, catches his eyes and sees him swallow.  Then, he smiles.

“I would be glad to do that, Colonel,” he answers warmly, surprised that she’s sought him out not to announce her decision, but to gain his perspective on what her next step should be.  He feels unexplainably peaceful, like a window was just opened in his office, like a breeze has just blown through.

He waits expectantly.

She notices he’s letting her run the meeting and she shifts her attention to her notes.  “Well, firstly, I just wondered, Sir, how are things going at the SGC?”

“You mean at Cheyenne?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“How do you mean?” He remembers her asking about the position last week and wonders why she feels stuck on it.

“Well… quite honestly, Sir, I was surprised the position of SGC commander wasn’t on the list you gave me… I know you said ‘that ship has sailed’ but with the work I’ve done and with my experience, I honestly thought the brass would want me there.”

She watches him look away, scratch at his head.  “Carter, the SGC is currently manned.  I can't exactly fire Reynolds.”

“I see,” she responds, but still looks confused.  “That's why the position wasn’t on the list, then,” she repeats, buying herself time as she thinks through her notes.

“If you want to discuss a position within the SGC we can work on that, I’d let Hank take the lead on it and find something suitable.  I didn’t think you wanted to be near the gate anymore, Colonel, what with the kids and all…” She notes her title and his posture and tries to deal with the different ways they relate to each other at different times of day.

“Yes, Sir.  I… I've been considering it, Sir.” She pauses, looks up at the ceiling.  “The truth is… I miss it.”

“The Gate?”

She nods.  “Sounds stupid, I know, but I’ve been thinking… since our last meeting, If I’m going to stay in the Air force, then you were right, I need to use my… my experiences, serve in the best capacity possible.”

“I think that’s wise.”

She nods.  “I thought the SGC might be stable enough now that I could try it, even with the kids.”

“You know nothing is stable for long.  We never know what enemy will knock on our door next.”

She agrees.  “Yes, Sir.”

“But like I said, the post is currently manned.”

She looks confused again, and even though she thinks Reynolds is an idiot, she thinks the man is probably ready for a promotion.  “Why can't Reynolds be offered Homeworld?”

“Because Landry's commanding Homeworld.”

She frowns, the position of Homeworld command was on her list, the one Jack gave her as a possible posting.  “But…you offered Landry’s post to me!”

“Yeah.”

She sighs and wants to roll her eyes.

He takes in a deep breath.  “Let’s talk about that post.  Landry needs to retire, Carter.”

“Okay,” she says.  “Why will they let him retire and not you?”

Jack bites down and sucks in a breath.  “I know it’s hard to imagine, but Hank’s a lot older than I am, Carter.”

“I know that, Sir,” she shakes her head at her screen.

“The President has already deferred his retirement twice and we’ve honestly reached the statutory limit.  He needs to retire before his next birthday.”

“Of course, Sir.”

“Traditionally, the replacement for that role has been the SGC Commander, but, you know as well as I do that Reynolds doesn’t have what it takes for Homeworld.”

Sam nods and licks her lips.  “If he doesn’t have what it takes for Homeworld, then why is he commanding the SGC?”

“Because we were out of options.”  She hears what he doesn’t say, hears that he didn’t put her there earlier because of her new life and her husband and her kids.  “And he's doing a decent job there now, we’ve been happy with his command decisions, but Landry and I agree… we’re not promoting the man to a job as important as Homeworld.”

“So, you want me to do it.”

“It’s on the list,” he points to his camera and she knows he’s pointing at her, at her notes.

She doesn't acquiesce, despite her answer of, “Yes, the list.”

“There is one other thing I could offer you,” he says.

“What is it?”

“Atlantis.”

“Atlantis,” she repeats.  It was her dream posting at one point.  It seems like forever ago.

“Yes.”

“On New Athos?”

 “On New Athos,” he confirms.  “McKay would probably love it.”

She smiles into the camera.  “I appreciate that, Sir.  I’m grateful for your confidence in me.”

“Because of the kids, I didn’t add it to your list…”

“I know,” she nods.  “Help me find a better option,” she asks him, “tell me, from your opinion, what the best option is.”

He wants to, wants to take her hand and place it on the handle of the right door, but he can’t be that person.  He knows she has to do it herself. 

“Sam…”

“Sir,” she interrupts him, ready to bring up her next point: “every position on this list would move me to Washington.”

“Yes, so, therefore…”

“Why?” she asks.

“Why?” he parrots. 

“I don’t need a sitter,” she accuses.

“I never thought you did.  Trust me, the list was not made for selfish reasons.  Your rank and experience places you in D.C. at this point in your career.  That isn’t my doing, Sam.  It makes no sense to put you anywhere else in the world.  We need you for Stargate, alien, and airspace technology and science.  We need you to make command decisions with all of those facets in mind.  That’s your expertise and your value.  That is your gift.”

She blinks and stares at him on her computer screen and he doesn’t break her eye-lock until she feels his pride and confidence in her deep down in her bones.  She feels suddenly warm, sweaty, and she looks around her room.  “Permission to speak freely, Sir.”

“Granted.”

She licks her lips and looks down to her keyboard as she says, “I'm not ready for Washington, Sir.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Jack,” she looks into her screen and finds his eyes already on her.

“What?” he says softly. 

She pauses only for a second.  “I'm not ready for what’s undoubtedly going to happen if I move to D.C.”

A beat.  And then he gets it.

“Sam…”

“Just - I need more time.”

“I would never pressure you,” he says sincerely.

“You wouldn’t have to,” she says looking straight at him.  “You know that.”

It’s the closest they've come to a confession in almost three years, and Jack is both ecstatic and terrified.  He wants to say more and can tell she wants to say more, but this is an official Air Force video meeting and they’ve said too much already. 

“Let’s discuss the next post on the list, Colonel.  I promise to give you my honest opinion of how your skills will contribute to each.”

She nods, understanding that this isn’t the venue for the type of conversation they need to have, and she begins talking about her likes and dislikes about the position that is next on her list.  They talk through the list, and Sam takes notes and speaks up and Jack advises her as well as he can.  Before they end the video call, Jack has one more item he needs to bring up.

“It’s just one more thing… before you are able to return to active duty.”  Sam’s been back to work at Groom Lake, but she’s still doing paperwork and minor projects.

“Yes, Sir?”

“We’re going to need a psych eval., standard procedure.  Your CO should be contacting you soon about setting it up.”

“A psych eval?”  She’s had plenty of those in her years with the Stargate program.  She can’t exactly say she loves getting them.

“I know, Carter… it’s out of my hands.”

“Why?”

He clears his throat.  “Because your spouse died tragically and you were given the regular bereavement and then an extended leave.  It’s common practice, Carter.”  When she just stares at her screen, he adds, “PTSD doesn’t just happen during times of war.  Trauma causes extreme changes in one’s psyche.  You know that.”

She nods.  “I’m in counseling, Jack.”

He nods back.  He feels an enormous wave of relief that she’s had the fortitude to seek help. 

“If you’d like, I can see if we can have the paperwork funneled through your current… counselor.”

“I’d prefer that, thank you.”  Sam thinks about Penny and knows that self-care for her also means returning to the grief therapist and hashing out the things she’s kept hidden, away from the outside world.  It’s time.

“Colonel, I’m afraid I have another call now,” Jack says, though he looks reluctant to hang up.

“Certainly, Sir.  I’m sorry to have taken so much of your time and I’ll get back with you as soon as possible regarding my decision.”

“You do that, Colonel.”

“Bye, Sir.”

He waves and his camera disconnects.

Sam closes her eyes and takes deep breaths.  The conversation couldn’t have gone any better, in her opinion, and she looks down at her paper and the myriad of notes she’s made and she nods to herself, happy that she has more information, has his opinion to add to her choices.  She understands a little better too, about where exactly they need her and why.  She thinks about their moment of quiet understanding, remembers his voice as he’d told her he wouldn’t pressure her and that he has the upmost confidence that she can do anything on the list.  She feels all-around good about herself, even with the psych eval news thrown in.  She understands it actually, wants to praise the Air Force for taking care of its personnel and thinks she’ll submit to whatever they need her to go through.  She realizes also that she wants to be well, to be fully on the road to healing from her grief in order to have full capacity of all her senses when she’s on duty, even her heart.

sSsSsSsSs

Sam goes through her days and she thinks she’s made a decision about the job, feels pretty confident, all things considered.  Her house in Nevada has a covered patio in the back, and Pete had planted snapdragons all around the concreted area.  She sits out there, wondering why she’s never enjoyed the patio or stopped to admire the beauty of the place and the color of the snapdragons.  She doesn’t understand a plant that can flower even in winter, even if it is the desert.  She sits on a lawn chair and sips at a glass of Chardonnay and she thinks about Jack.  She remembers him sitting on his dock at the cabin with her, a beer in one hand and his fishing pole in the other.  To her, the image seems like a lifetime ago.  She remembers the blissful peace and the crisp air and the calmness that emanated from the water at his pond.  Sam wants to be there again, desperately.  She takes a deep breath and fishes her cell phone out of her jeans’ pocket.  She maneuvers her phone to do what she wishes, and puts it up to her ear.  One ring, then another.

“Carter?” Jack’s voice into her phone. 

“Hi,” she speaks, and the way her body melts into the seat has everything to do with his voice.

“Hi,” he answers.

“Hey, I thought it’d be okay to call this late, didn’t think you’d be sleeping,” she prefaces.

“I’m not,” he says, “just… in bed.”

“Oh… I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, hang on.”  He scoots himself out of his bed and walks out of his room.  “I’m here,” he says padding down the hallway.  “I’m glad you called.”

“You are?”

“Yeah… I just, uh, thought we should talk, after the other day...”

“Oh,” Sam feels suddenly out of breath.

“Uh,” Jack backtracks.  “Why did you call?”  Maybe he misunderstood and she has some sort of professional purpose.

He hears her exhale.  “I just wanted to talk to you…”

They are both silent and across the distance, their hearts hammer, each in their own chests. 

Jack wants to name what is happening, he doesn’t want her to run away.  “Look, I don’t want things to be awkward between us, we were just starting to…”

“Things don’t have to be awkward, not anymore.”

“Okay,” Jack says, relieved, still trying to gauge where the conversation is headed.   Jack reaches his kitchen and digs a beer out of the fridge. 

“I hate not being able to tell you exactly what I'm thinking.  I'm tired of it,” Sam reveals.  “I miss you, I miss talking to you… I miss what we had before…”

Jack’s heart hammers faster, and he takes in air but there doesn’t seem to be enough oxygen in the room to feed his aching lungs.  “Sam…” he exhales.  “I miss you so much.”

He hears her exhale too and imagines that she’s hugging herself.  He closes his eyes and pictures her, thinks of her new dark hair and her long dark eyelashes.  He leans on his kitchen counter and takes a long draw of his beer.

“But, you're always my commanding officer, my superior, and I'm… I was married.”

“Right,” Jack remembers their long history, wants to forget.

“I'm not married anymore,” Sam says and Jack freezes.

“I know.”

“You're still my superior.  That isn’t likely to change, is it?”

Jack thinks and patters over to his living room, falls onto the couch.  “Umm, are we actually talking about this? I thought you said you weren’t ready?”

“I'm not.”

“Okay, then.”

“I just want to know.”

“Honestly? I don’t give a damn,” Jack tells her.

She nods into her backyard and they are quiet for a minute.

“Jack?”

“Yeah?”

“Has anything changed?”

He has to think about what she's saying.  It's vague but he thinks he knows, thinks she means his heart.  “No,” he answers.

“There isn’t…” she can’t formulate the words.

“There’s only you,” he answers clearly.  “Even when there have been other women, it’s still always been only you.”  He hears her exhale and it causes him to breathe deeply too.

“I have kids now,” she hedges, almost a whisper.

“I'd still want you if you had a million,” he says immediately, realizing that his mouth is on the loose tonight.

He hears her breathing again, but she doesn’t speak.  “And you?”  He decides to ask.

She has to think for a moment, but only because she can’t find the words to say what she means.  “Jack… I never stopped.”

“Sam…”

“Jack.”

“I…”

“I’m leaning toward the job at Homeworld,” she gets out.  “I have some… requests to make about the job, but I was thinking it would be the place I’m needed the most right now.”

In Washington D.C., Jack begins to smile.  “It is.”

“I think I can be successful there… in that office, in that role.”

“I know you can be, Sam,” Jack tells her.

“Okay,” says.

“And us?” Jack asks.

“What about us?”  Sam says.

Jack clears his throat.  “Us is ‘inevitable’?” he quotes her, “eventually…”

“Yes,” she answers.

“I know you need more time.”

“Yeah…”

There is a bird picking mosquitos off the plants and Sam watches it, sees it collect the last of the day’s meal before flying away to find shelter from the cold night.  Sam feels freer, like she might finally be able to fly away too.

“Sam?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m going to give someone else your file from now on.”  Sam’s eyes widen and she understands what it is he’s saying.  He needs to give her over to the next superior because he’s in too deep to be able to validate any further decisions.  She thinks he’s always been in too deep but that now she’s jumped in too and the water is crowded.

“Landry?”

“Yes… and the President.”

She nods.  “Okay.”

“Nothing has to happen yet, but that’s the wisest course of action at this point.”

“I agree,” she tells him.  “And Christmas?”

“What about Christmas?”

“You’ll spend it with us?  Cassie finally talked to me about it and she’ll be heartbroken if you don’t come.”

Jack laughs.  He thinks about the litter of Bouviers that were born two weeks ago and how he had already gone over to the breeder and picked out the strongest one to be Sam’s future dog.  “I wouldn’t miss it for anything,” Jack tells her, thinking of the red collar around the little puppy’s neck with the label “O’Neill” on it. 

“Good,” Sam says. 

“Yeah,” he answers.

There’s a bit of awkwardness again, but Sam pushes through it.  “I met someone who grew up in Minnesota,” she starts out, and soon enough, an hour has passed, and Sam feels lazy and wonderful, her glass empty and her mouth dry after all the talking that she’s done.  In D.C., Jack is three parts relaxed and one part anxious.  He’s waited forever for this woman and he doesn’t want any bit of this to go to pot.

“Goodnight, Sam,” Jack says warmly, when the hour is too late.

“Goodnight, Jack,” she answers, a swarm of butterflies inside.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, hasn't seen Beta. Thanks to A and N for the friendliest push to publish :o)


	25. I Wish

Sam’s had a record four cookies when she finishes telling Penny about her day clearing out Pete’s things.  She’d cleared out his closet and his drawers and the boxes that arrived from his office at work.  She’d found a copy of a background check he’d ran on her early on in their relationship, and deep in a shoe box in the garage, pictures of Sam in the shower, sunbathing in the backyard, naked and sleeping in their bed.  She’d found pictures of other women too in similar situations. 

“I had a little bonfire,” Sam tells Penny.  “Nearly burned the house down in my ire.”

“I’m sorry, Sam.”

Sam shakes her head, unconcerned with sharing details with the nun.  “No, not like that Penny.  Just…” Sam takes in a deep breath and lets it out.  “How could I have been so blind? And for so long!”

Penny looks at her.  “Did you find anything at all that was positive?”

She looks up, meets Penny’s gaze, realizes the truth and swallows hard.  “Yeah… guess the negative seems overpowering though.”

“Tell me,” Penny pushes.  “About the good things.”

Sam tilts her coffee cup all the way back and drains the rest of the liquid.  “Pictures of us that were sweet, pictures of the kids, something that I’m assuming he bought me for Christmas… or my birthday, I’m not sure… new leather boots.  Really nice ones, in my size.” She remembered having mentioned needing new ones and as she tried them on, they had fit her perfectly.  “Probably an expensive present bought out of guilt.”  She sighs.

Penny shakes her head.  “You’ve really been put through the woods…”

“You keep saying that…”

“Because It’s true!  You know…”

“I don’t.  I happen to like the woods,” Sam’s very outdoorsy and she doesn’t get the connection with how the woods can be painful.

“Well, you know… going through the wood.”

“Penny?”

“You’ve never seen ‘Into the Woods’?”

“The movie?”

“No, not the movie!  The musical, the show! Stephen Sondheim!”  Penny looks at Sam like she has to know what she’s talking about.  “Oh, my God, you’ve never seen the Broadway show?”

“Penny…” Sam tilts her head to the ceiling and actually thinks she’s made a mistake in coming today and that the nun is crazy.

“I’m not crazy, Sam,” Penny calls her on her thoughts.  “You’ve properly been through the woods if anyone’s ever been through one.”

“Seriously?  The movie with Meryl Streep?” Sam asks again.

“I’m telling you, not the movie, that was pure crap, and I happen to love Meryl, but that rendition was crap.  Umm…” Penny looks up again, thinking, as is her habit to do.  “The best one is the recorded version of the Broadway show from the 90s… you know… with Bernadette Petters…” Penny sees that Sam is still clueless.  “Goodness, child, you don’t even know who Bernadette Petters is?”

Sam laughs.  “For a nun, you sure are worldly.”

Penny rolls her eyes.  “Just because I’m religious doesn’t mean I have no life, likes, or hobbies.  I can’t understand why people always assume that.”

Sam looks up and sighs.  “I didn’t mean…”

“Listen,” Penny doesn’t waste time.  “You don’t look convinced enough to watch it but I’m going to tell you… you’ve been through the woods, big time, you’ve lost so much… but you just need to realize, going through the woods is something everyone has to do... something everyone has to face.” Penny places her hand on Sam’s.  “People make mistakes… women, men, fathers, mothers, people make mistakes…  Thinking they’re alone… but no one is alone.”  Penny speaks the play’s words with meaning.  “You decide what’s right, Sam, you decide what’s good.”

“Are you about to start singing?”  Sam asks, incredulous.

“Ha!” Penny laughs, but then turns introspective.  “I’ve just always loved it.  It always brings me hope.”

They are silent again and Sam loves the silence.  For all of her talking, Penny has gone mute again allowing Sam to think.  They are quiet for an enormous stretch of time, and before Sam leaves, she thanks Penny for listening, gets up and gives the nun a kiss on the cheek.  Penny stops her with a hand on her arm and looks up to her as Sam stands above her.

“Where is Jack, Sam?”

Sam’s been speaking to him on the phone, they’ve been getting closer for weeks, the connection reestablishing, but Sam’s been so cautious and so slow.  Penny’s question lingers for her. She knows where he is.  She knows where to find him.

She has to drive to 4 different video stores to find what she’s looking for; two of the shops are going out of business and their stocks are low, the others are bare of movies to make room for video games.  There is a new thing now, a video by demand company mailing DVD’s to patrons at their own homes, and Sam thinks she ought to just sign up for the service as well.  She gets home and goes through her routine, spends the rest of the day with her kids, feeds them dinner, bathes them, reads to them, snuggles them in her own bed until they drift off.  When they are asleep, she slips down her mattress and heads to the living room.  She pops the video in, the one she found earlier, and pours herself wine from a bottle that she opens.  She takes a sip as the opening song plays and grimaces, the wine needs to breathe a minute, she thinks, and watches the play as it goes on. 

It’s humorous, Sam thinks, definitely a comedy, and Sam tries to picture what kind of nun Penny really is to own a TV and to have watched every version of Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods” that is available.  She watches the first act and likes the story, laughs even, loves the part of the Witch, learning who Bernadette Peters is.  She thinks Cinderella sounds a bit whinny, wonders if that is her too.  She finds herself drawn to the Baker’s wife, finds that she identifies with her, wanting a child, wanting a life, wanting, wanting, wanting.  She watches all of the scenes where the characters go into the woods and doesn’t think Penny was right, doesn’t really see how her situation can in any way match the story, the characters, the things Penny said to her. 

She’s on her third glass of wine and on her third hour into the play when she gets it, sees that what each character wished for had created consequences, big changes not just to themselves but to others.  She watches, sees the Baker’s wife kiss the prince, sees her disappear behind the stage during one of her trips into the woods, sees the desperation of the Baker when he learns his wife’s fate, learns of his future without her.  She watches, unblinking, as the fate of all of the characters unravel, hears each of them sing that people make mistakes.  They sing, finally, about the clichés and platitudes of life, of the woods, of life’s depravity and of loneliness.   She moves from her spot on the couch closer to her TV, sits right in front of it and hears their mingled voices echo through her ears.

She blinks as her eyes begin to fill, and she remembers the choices she’s made and the reasons for them, thinking she was alone, holding to her own. She clutches a couch pillow to her chest and thinks about Jack, knows he’s on her side, knows he’s always been. 

“You are not alone, no one is alone,” the characters sing to her repeatedly.  But, over and over, as they move around the stage and confess to their mistakes, they repeat, with gusto, that going into the woods is the wisest choice, that taking a chance is worth its weight in gold.  According to the story, it’s the only way to cope, the only way of getting through the journey of life.  The finale ends, the stage goes black, and then the curtain call begins, the actors bowing and the audience applauding.  Sam is still sitting on the floor, near the TV.  Sam sees what Penny means about hope, sees that her recent life has been a long, dark trip through the woods, but that she’s on the other side now, and she feels ready to move on.  She’s a little afraid, but she wants to do it.  She remembers Penny’s question to her before she left, the nun’s voice echoing in her mind.  She knows where Jack is, so she pushes herself off the floor and stands up.

She turns the TV off, walks her glass to the kitchen and sets it down.  She walks purposefully to her bedroom and sneaks in, tiptoes to the dresser and unplugs her phone from the charger.  She nears her bed and tucks Drew’s foot back under the covers, checks to see that Jenny has room to breathe under the mountain of blankets she routinely sleeps covering her face.  She walks back out and dials his number.

“Hey,” he picks up on the second ring.

“Hi, is this a good time?” she asks, hearing a good deal of background noise.

He clears his throat.  “Yeah, just… still at the office.”

“Oh, I can call tomorrow…”

“No, it’s fine.  We’re all sitting around waiting…” he says in his best annoyed voice.

“Waiting?”

“A proposal’s been made, negotiations back and forth… we’re supposed to get an update any minute,” he explains.

“Ah… so you’re all sitting around waiting for this call from… let me guess, a major world leader?”

“Basically…”

She smiles.  “I’ll call you tomorrow?”

“Yes, I’d like that, but did you need something… right now?” he asks and she can hear that he’s moved to a quieter spot.

“No, it’s fine, we can talk tomorrow.”

“You sure?  I’m just… waiting,” he repeats.

She coughs and her face flushes and she’s glad he can’t see her.  “Okay, well… I was just wondering, next week, when I go for my meeting with Landry…”

“Yeah?”

“Can I stay in your guest room?”

He’s silent on the other end and she doesn’t know what that means.

Panic makes her speak.  “Of course, I can just get a hotel, and—”

“Sam!” he interrupts.

“Yeah?”

“Of course you can stay here, you don’t even have to ask.”

She blows out her breath silently and wonders if she’s the only one that can hear the fast beating of her heart in her ears.  “Thanks,” she tries for calm.

“I’m really looking forward to seeing you,” he whispers.

“Me too.”

There are voices and hushed tones and he apologizes that he has to go and just like that she has a plan to see him and an opportunity to let her heart be and do as it has always wanted to.  The grief counselor’s been helping, finally, and Jenny and Drew are coping better than she imagined they would; there are no more excuses for hanging out in the deep, dark woods. 

She walks sedately to her room and slinks her body back into bed, in between her children who are now spread all over her king-size bed.  She closes her eyes and sleeps easily for the first time since Pete died.  She is not alone, and she’s done wishing.

 

_“Mother cannot guide you, now you’re on your own.  Only me beside you, still you’re not alone.  No one is alone, truly, no one is alone… Sometimes people leave you halfway through the wood; others may deceive you, you decide what’s good.  You decide alone.  No one is alone.”_

**_Stephen Sondheim, Into the Woods_ **


	26. Awakening

Sam feels excitement and anticipation when she steps through the security checkpoint at the Pentagon a week later.  She’s headed to a different office this time, Landry’s office, and as she walks she imagines herself working in this place again, walking in each day and doing the kind of work that leads and saves, serves and protects. 

“Sam!” she hears Landry’s voice before she can even sign in with his secretary.  She smiles and meets his hand on the greeting.

“General Landry, thank you for seeing me, Sir,” she says as he guides her into his office and offers her a seat.

“Not at all, Colonel.  Thank you for coming all this way.  Jack told me you’ve already been in for an assignment consultation with him, so I’m thankful you were able to fly back over.”

“Of course, General, it’s no problem.”

“Yes, well,” he sits too, “tell me, Sam, how are you and the children coping… after what happened with your husband?”

Sam nods and answers, well-rehearsed since people ask her the same thing daily.  “We are doing as well as expected, General.  Jenny and Drew miss him, ask about him often, and honestly that’s the hardest part.  I lost my mom when I was twelve so I know some of the pain they feel.”

“Soo unfortunate what happened.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“I received your psych eval and am pleased with the report given.  It appears you sought help as soon as it was needed, and that’s part of what makes you a great asset, Colonel.  I wanted to make sure that you knew that I would personally pay for any additional counseling that is needed for the children or you in this situation.”

Sam is taken aback.  “Sir, that is very generous.  Thank you.  I’ll remember that.”

Landry nods and is silent, and Sam can see he is affected by her tragedy and is sincere in his offer.

“Right.  Now, on to business.  He rises and goes behind his desk.  Jack caught me up on the positions he offered you and the ones he thought you were leaning on.”

“Yes, Sir.”  Sam wonders if Landry will give her the same mercies that Jack gave or if he’ll stick her exactly where he sees fit, as is any C.O.’s discretion.

“Well?”  He waits for her to speak up.

“Sir, I don’t mean to presume, but General O’Neill did advise me that the best option on the list and the post where I might be most needed is… this one, Sir.”

“Ah… my job!”

Sam looks on nervously.

“You’re lucky that I happen to agree.”  Sam blows out a breath and smiles.  “Though I wasn’t sure,” Hank continues, “Jack said you might have a hankering to stay close to the Stargate… he thinks you miss it or some such nonsense.”

Sam smiles again and nods.  “Interesting theory,” she says.

Hank actually belly laughs and Sam is caught off guard by how easily the meeting is going and how light and free and sure of herself she feels.  They spend the next hour going over Hank’s responsibilities, the job objectives, the subordinates, the operations.  He tells her the areas he thinks need improvement, the areas he personally believes to be his personal victories, the list of things he still wanted to accomplish but had yet to skim the surface.  Sam sees the potential, and by the end of the meeting her eyes are gleaming.

“My retirement is set for March 15, and we’d like to get you settled in D.C. by March 8th.  Your last day at Groom Lake is March 1.”

“Wow,” Sam exhales. 

“An Air Force liaison will be contacting you with information on housing, realtors, schools for the kids… that sort of thing.” 

“Thank you, Sir.”  Sam stands when she sees Landry begin to stand, a folder in his hand.

“Just one more thing,” he holds up the folder.  “When I received your file and reviewed everything from your previous commanding officer, I found that he was… a bit conservative in his commendations toward an early promotion.”  Sam swallows and her face blanches.  “Your work on the George Hammond, your leadership on the hyperdrive issues with Atlantis and your communication solutions for the Destiny, not to even mention the fact that you created the first human device to successfully produce a wormhole…”

Sam’s eyes are wide and Landry keeps talking, “I assumed of course, that it was because of your close relationship as friends and being true colleagues of many years that Jack held back…it shows Jack’s supreme professionalism in remaining aboveboard and unwilling to show favoritism to an excelling airman just because they were close friends.”

Sam opens her mouth but nothing comes out.

“The President agreed, of course, and the recommendation ultimately came from him,” Landry opens the folder and turns it to Sam, opened.  “Please be present for your confirmation hearing with the senate committee on March 5th and subsequently at the White House for your promotion ceremony, Brigadier General Samantha Carter.”

Sam’s mouth is completely slack and she looks down at the folder and then back up at her new commanding officer.  She squares her shoulders and has the decency to smile.  “Sir, what an honor.”

“Congratulations, Ma’am,” Landry says in the true show of equality, and Sam shows all her teeth in laughter.

sSsSsSsSs

Sam is so stunned and happy that she decides to stop by Jack’s office.  She thinks popping her head in will be cute and breezy and no big deal at all, until she gets there and Peggy Ritter is all flustered around what appears to be general chaos.

“General O’Neill thought you might drop by and he apologizes, Ma’am.  He’s at the White House but he did leave this for you,” Peggy searches her desk until she finds a white envelope with her name on it and hands it to Sam.

“Thank you, Peggy.  It’s really fine, I wasn’t expected,” Sam takes the envelope but doesn’t open it, listening as Peggy apologizes, but that the current crisis needs her attention.  Sam disappears from the frazzled woman’s sight and opts for the stairs instead of the elevators.  After she goes down half a level she pauses and pulls the envelope out, ripping it open with her index finger.  She sucks in her breath when she realizes that in her haste to get it open, she suffers a deep, painful paper-cut and she brings her finger up to her lips to soothe the burn.  She shakes her hand out and pulls the note out from the envelope.

_“Sam,_

_I have a meeting with POTUS after lunch which means I might see him close to 1600.  I know you are meeting with the Asgard tech committee at 1430, but can you meet me at Tony’s later? Say 1730?_

_If the day goes to pot for me, meet me at home… look in the envelope._

_Jack”_

She ignores the blood on her finger and reaches in and pulls from the envelope its surprise content.  She lifts it closer to her face and sees it: a key is sitting at the palm of her hand attached to a keychain with one of those white circular labels.   In the center, in his scrawl, are the words, “ _Carter’s key.”_

She feels a pressure in her sternum, tight and constricting, and she closes her eyes, puts her head back against the hard, cold wall of the Pentagon staircase.  She closes her fist tightly around the key and takes a moment to enjoy the drunk feeling of elation that she is getting from this day: her promotion news, his note, the key in her hand.   Another wave of tight pressure begins at her heart and suddenly travels in a wave all the way down her body at lightning speed, coming to an abrupt crash between her legs and she breathes out and opens her eyes, shocked.  She looks around and confirms that she is still alone, touches her closed fist to her chest and continues to feel, to enjoy, to take small, shallow breaths.  She quirks half a lip up, enjoying the pressure below, enjoying the way she can feel her fast heart beating through her sex, thrilled that she’s back, that she feels more like herself this very minute than she has over the past five years.  When she finally makes it down the full flight of stairs and out the door, she has a full smile on her face and undergarments that are soaked.

sSsSsSsSs

He arrives at Tony’s and looks around the crowded small lobby.  He sees her shoved up against a corner, the huge fish aquarium Tony has is against her back and it makes it look like she’s bathed in a vibrant blue hue.  She’s holding one of the flat vibrators that will indicate their table is ready in one hand and she waves at him with the other.  He waves back as he walks and drinks her in.  She’s in some sort of tight pants, Jack thinks people call them leggings, and a flowy dress over it that ends at her thighs.  He’s never seen her in pants that are that tight or in a dress that is both relaxed and bewitching at the same time and he’s taken aback by her beauty.

“Hey,” he says as he reaches her.

“Hi,” she says, her voice sounding parched.

“You want a drink?” he looks behind him at the bar but she shakes her head.

“Nah, let’s wait,” she says, going from one foot to the other.  “I bet our table will be ready soon.”

“Sure,” he looks at her and she looks back and he just can’t stop staring at her, her neck, her dress, her eyes, the way her dark hair is flowing loosely down her back.

“What?” she asks after a moment.

“Nothing,” he downplays initially and looks away, but then she watches his face and sees something switch, a split decision that he makes. 

“Actually,” he turns his head back, deliberately getting closer to her, right in her space and he looks her in the eye.  “I need to tell you something I’ve wanted to tell you for 13 years.”

She looks back into his eyes.  “Okay,” she states, uncertain and breathless from his proximity.

He comes closer still and his cheek brushes hers on his way to her ear, where he whispers, “You’re beautiful.” 

Sam closes her eyes and breathes out and the things she felt at the staircase at the Pentagon come back, stronger and with added pressure.  She realizes that she hasn’t felt this sudden arousal that is so comforting to her and so true of who she is as a woman in years.  She’s been stirring up guilt and pain within herself, but Jack, he stirs up desire.  Jack stirs up an emotion she can’t quite name.

His hand mingles with hers between their bodies and she feels his breath on her ear and hears the words that he’s still saying, “you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever laid eyes on.” She moves her head so that her ear is nearer to his mouth and her hands tighten around his and the vibrator that he’s now holding instead of her between them and he still doesn’t seem to be done talking.  “And I’ve traveled to quite a few planets, a whole other galaxy even…”

“Yeah?” she pants, short on oxygen.

He pulls back and her eyes flutter open.

“There’s no one like you.  No one even to compare with you.  No one comes near what being around you is like for me,” Jack speaks slowly and clearly, his eyes never leaving hers.

She stares at his brown eyes until she feels hot and he tips forward and goes in against her and holds her close, hugs her there and she closes her eyes again and falls into the hug and smells him, smiles when she remembers her can of WD-40 that she still has on her lab bench.  She’s the only one that knows why it’s still there.  Unconsciously, she rubs her face against him and feels rather than hears him grunt.  On cue, the vibrator between them starts buzzing, its red lights making a show against her dress shirt, and they pull apart slowly, looking down between them and seeing the device amid their mingled hands.  Jack sees something, pulls Sam’s hand up so he can inspect it, notices the red line and angry hue from her envelope injury earlier in the day.  He looks up at her in question, his hand still cradling hers.

“Paper cut,” she explains, her voice much hoarser than she expected.

In slow motion, he guides her hand up to his mouth, and with parted lips brings her index finger to them, kisses her paper cut and Sam swears she can feel his tongue on her red, sensitive skin.  She has to close her eyes as her chest expands again. 

“Jack…”

The vibrator between them starts buzzing once more, another cycle of light shows trying to get them to their destination. 

“C’mon,” he says, tugging her injured hand gently, and Sam moves her shaky legs through the throng of people who will likely wait a while for a table.  They arrive at a different area than Jack usually sits in, but he doesn’t seem put off and Sam’s still buzzing from the previous moment enough to notice.  It’s a bigger table this time, a large booth, and she slides in on one side and he slides in the other.  Sam feels the distance between them like a cold chasm compared to their nearness moments ago.  The hostess, whom Jack chats with, leaves them with two menus and then a short, friendly looking woman comes over and Jack actually stands up to hug her.  Sam watches, amazed, because in all of her years working with this man, she’d never seen him be this affectionate with anyone beyond his team.

“Paula, this is Sam,” he introduces the woman.  “Sam, this is Paula, Tony’s wife.”

Paula smiles wildly at her and Sam has the foresight to scoot her body out of the booth in time for Paula to give each of her cheeks a kiss, European style.  “How nice to meet you, Sam.  Tony told me you are pretty, but I think you are more than that!”

“Oh, thank you,” Sam blushes at the woman, admiring her accent and her well-spoken English.

Jack asks Paula to bring them the usual, checking to see if Sam wants wine or beer, and then Paula leaves them.  Instead of sliding back in on his side, Jack again makes a split decision, and turns his body into her side of the booth.  Noticing, Sam scoots further in to make room for him.

“This okay?  Too far to talk over there.”

“Yeah, sure,” she says at first, then she turns to him and their eyes meet.  “It was definitely too far.”

He grins and she grins back, and she has to look away at their game. 

“Key work okay?” he asks.

“Yeah, worked fine,” she says, trying to downplay the key’s significance and her reaction to having it.  She doesn’t know if she should offer the key back now that she’s in the company of the homeowner.  “Thanks for leaving it.  It was nice to be able to take my bag and change.”

“Put it on your key-chain,” he says easily.  “It’s yours.  That’ll make it easier any time you come to visit.”

Her eyes snap to his and they share another loaded look until Paula comes back with their drinks and with Tony.  Jack stays in the booth this time and lets Tony clap him on the back and shake Sam’s hand rather forcefully.  He delivers a salad platter and leaves them.

It isn’t as awkward anymore between them, because they’ve been talking on the phone and just like best friends who have spent years apart and then re-connect in the blink of an eye, their friendship is the first thing to rekindle, and the talking becomes easy, the topics flowing as quickly as the food that is coming out of the kitchen and being delivered to their table.  Sam ignores all her side dishes and polishes off her entire steak before she brings up the topic that she’s dying to talk over with him.

“So, I met with General Landry,” Sam prefaces, taking a drink of her beer.

Jack half grimaces.  “Uh, how did it go?”

Sam’s forehead creases.  “You don’t know?”

“I don’t know what?”

She looks at him oddly. 

“I’m not playing you, Sam.  I don’t know.  I’m a little hesitant because I didn’t think he’d give you options as much as shove you wherever the hell he needed you.  It’s kind of him MO.  Am I right?”

She shakes her head.  “They want me to take his post when he retires.”

“That’s what you wanted,” he nods, “and I told you… that’s where you’re needed.”

She nods too.  “And they’re promoting me.”

“What?”

“Brigadier General,” she says, “pending Senate confirmation.”

His eyes wonder around the room for a moment, thinking.  “You’ll get confirmed.  It’s a classified post, there are only three Senators with clearance, and they are very pro-Stargate at the moment,” he tells her, turning his body toward her.  “The President has to be the one to—”

“The recommendation is coming from him.  I have a meeting with him tomorrow.”

He nods and then goes silent.

“What?”

“I should have handed over your file a long time ago,” he says.

“Jack...”

“They’ve been running into the statutory limits with Generals too often and Hayes has been wanting younger airmen confirmed to high level clearance posts so they can serve longer, move around but still be useful, able...” he sighs.  “I should have—”

“Don’t,” she says again and reaches her hand to his cheek.  She watches his reaction to her hand on his face, sees his heavy-lidded eyes as they relish her touch.  “You protected me.  Without you, things would have been much harder… impossible for me.”  She moves her thumb on his face and sees him lean on her hand and his eyes slip closed.  She thinks of her reaction to him in the staircase, her reaction to him in the restaurant lobby.  She’s overcome with an overwhelming need to produce that same reaction in him.  Sensing it, his eyes fly open.  Jack licks his lips and his eyes move to her mouth.  She watches his eyes as he watches her mouth.

“Kiss me,” she tells him, and she’s a little surprised she’s asked.  Jack doesn’t need to be told twice, and he leans in, his head tilting at a slight angle to avoid hitting her nose, but he doesn’t kiss her mouth.  His lips are near to hers and both their eyes are closed but he just stays there, lets his breath mingle with hers.  He moves up, lets his parted lips drag across her cheeks, her jawline, her chin.  Her breathing becomes erratic and her heartbeat explosive.  The noise of the life of the restaurant doesn’t disturb them, nothing can when they are finally allowed this pleasure.  When she feels his lips on her eyes, she moves her head and tries to kiss his neck, but he moves, captures her mouth, finally.  It’s gentle, and slow, and as well-behaved a kiss as she’s ever had from him.  She’s confused by this, because the acute innocence of the style of the kiss is such a direct contrast to how arousing, passionate, and seductive it is.  He pulls back from her just as sensually, and when Sam opens her eyes, she feels like’s she’s had at least five shots of tequila.  She feels how fast her heart is beating through the pulsating beat between her legs.  Staring at her, Jack doesn’t even have it in him to grin – he’s as affected as she is, his eyes just as dazed.

“I’m very proud of you, Carter.”

She smiles and ducks her head, her heart a swarm of joy.  Making him proud is worth for her what diamonds are worth for most girls.  Before they leave, Paula meets him at the exit with two huge brown bags.  Jack hugs her and carries the bags to the black SUV that is ready to drive them home.  Sam gets in and Jack talks shop with his driver and security detail at the front of the car for a minute until they both don headphones and Jack assures her they can’t hear a thing.  Sam’s high on life and she doesn’t give the other occupants of the car another thought before turning to Jack and threading her left hand through his hair.  He’s surprised but only for a minute because Sam’s mouth meets his and she takes his bottom lip in for a moment until the car turns a quick curve and their teeth clash.  Jack grins and she matches it, pulling back.  He turns his body and pins her to her seat and threads his own hand in her very dark hair and his mouth slants over hers, no longer gentle, no longer slow.  Sam’s mouth opens for him and he tastes her for the first time in years and they both moan at the sensation of the moment.  The kiss is long enough to slow down and Jack is deliberate in each angle that he takes, awakening Sam to every part of her body that lay dormant for far too long.  When his phone rings shrilly in the car, Sam is a puddle of arousal on the hot leather seat, her mouth swollen and her hair disheveled.  When Jack answers the call, his voice is several octaves below normal and his pants have an impressive dome in the front, and Sam loves the way that he doesn’t try to hide it.

“Jerry, to the White House, please,” he says to the driver while still on the phone, his head down in disappointment.  When the call ends, he closes his phone and apologizes to her, says he’s needed in the situation room and that Jerry will drive her home once he drops her off.  Then, he leans in and whispers in her ear.  Sam swears he kisses it too.  She’s pretty sure he’s told her he thinks she tastes better than the sweetest wine in the world, and then something about the sit-room and a situation that might take all night.

Sam walks into his home by herself for the second time that day.  She takes her shoes off and leaves them by the door, then walks the heavy brown bags to the kitchen and unpacks them.  There are eight round foiled food containers, labeled and dated.  Sam opens his fridge and finds it pretty empty, then opens the freezer side and sees similar round containers stacked up everywhere.  Apparently, Tony and Paula keep Jack stocked with quality food and Sam feel inanely grateful for them.  She adds the new batch to his freezer, except two that are labeled, “Salad. Do not freeze,” and she tosses them in his fridge. 

She walks up the stairs and sees her things laid out in the guest room where she had put them earlier, then walks to the other door, where she knows is his bedroom.  She pushes the door open and peers in, sees his bed that is made and his things that are here and there in the room.  She goes in and walks around, likes that there is a lost pair of socks on the floor and a layer of dust on the dresser.  She likes that he’s normal, that his things are allowed to be wherever they land.  She walks to his bed and sits down, takes a minute to sit and look around.  After a minute, she reaches for the top of the bed and pulls the covers down until she can get a pillow out.  There’s a night shirt on the floor near the bed, and she picks it up too, puts it up to her face and inhales the scent that is Jack.  She closes her eyes when the smell causes her to quiver again, deep down.  She takes the shirt and the pillow to her room, undresses and brushes her teeth.  Naked, she puts his shirt on and gets into the guest bed, flips the lights off and hugs the pillow to herself.  When she touches herself, she’s shocked at how she feels.  She hasn’t done this in ages and she can’t remember it ever feeling this good.  When she comes, she has to buck off the bed and is shocked at how loud her cry is in the empty house.  It’s his name on her lips, and when she lays her head down to finally sleep, she has a grin the size of Minnesota on her face, and a significant wet spot on his sheets.


	27. Crossing the Threshold

**Author’s Note:  Gutter alert. I’ve changed the rating for the story, and I’ll add an NSFW to this chapter as well. Definitely not suitable to be read at work.  Unless you work from home, then by all means… proceed.**

Jack steps off the tarmac from the transport airplane at Tonopah and has to hush Sam’s puppy when it starts whimpering again.  He hadn’t flown commercial in ages and when he tried to book a flight for Christmas, his security man told him in no uncertain terms that he should use a transport instead and avoid the extra security measures that would have to be drawn out for him.  Not one to want to bother the security detail during a family holiday, Jack did as he was told.  Frank, Jack’s weekend man, was flying with him and staying on base quarters while Jack stayed at Sam’s house.  He’d hoped Sam wouldn’t even have to find out about Frank coming at all.  It was standard procedure for an individual in his position, and Jack understood the measures all too well, especially when the threat level was slightly elevated.  Frank taps Jack’s shoulder as they walk, pointing to a secluded spot on the ground.  Jack nods and opens Sam’s puppy’s crate to let him out, instructing it to go.

“You’re just gonna call it ‘Sam’s Puppy,’ Sir?”

“Well… it’s Sam’s puppy,” he says to Frank.  “She can name him whatever she wants.”

“You’re not making any suggestions, Sir?  About the name?”

Jack thinks for a minute.  “Well… as long as she doesn’t name it ‘Jack’ I think it’ll be okay.”

Sam’s Puppy does his thing and Jack scoops the little black bundle up in his arms and doesn’t worry about putting it back in its crate.  They walk and retrieve their bags and Frank leaves Jack to go and find their vehicle when Jack sees a silver Jeep Grand Cherokee pull up in front of him.  The passenger window lowers and he sees her, hair up in a ponytail and her killer smile shinning toward him.  She lowers her top-gun sunglasses and grins towards him.

“Care for a ride?”

He laughs.  She puts the car in park and steps out, goes to greet him on the sidewalk.  She sees the puppy in his arms and she stops mid-step.

“Oh, my god!” It’s not just Jack O’Neill and then a puppy.  It’s Jack, her Jack, casual looking and ruggedly handsome, holding a puppy.  She’s salivating as she stares.

“Surprise!”

“I forgot,” she says, laughing.

“Really?” he asks her, “how could you forget?” He’s thought of little else but being here with her during Christmas.

Sam comes near and scoops the puppy into her arms, ooo-ing as she does.  She holds the dog up to her face and says, “A boy?”

“Of course,” Jack answers.  “Drew needed another male to even out the odds.”

She smiles.  “What’s his name?”  Sam hugs the pup to herself and looks up at him.

“Sam’s Puppy.”

She laughs.  “We’ll have to fix that.”

“I thought you should name him… just not ‘Jack.’”

She looks up at him again.  “I would never,” and she smiles.

“Uhum…”

“Sir,” a male voice interrupts their exchange.

Jack and Sam turn to face Frank who is sporting a look of fear and holding up a set of car keys.

“Busted…” Jack says to the man, but then, it’s his turn to be surprised.

“Mister Boyle,” Sam extends her hand to Frank.  “I hope General O’Neill hasn’t give you too much trouble on the way over here.  General Parker has cleared a comfortable room for you on base, and I hope you’ll come over for Christmas dinner.  Cassie is cooking a ham.”

“Ma’am,” he shakes her hand.  “Thank you, Ma’am.  And please, call me Frank.”

“Uh, Carter?” Jack tries.

“Are these all your bags?” She asks, opening up her trunk.  “Frank, we’ll wait and let you follow us so you know where the house is.”

“Thank you, Ma’am.”

When they’re both back in the car, Sam hands him the puppy and as she does she leans in and he is forced to do the same, though he doesn’t seem to mind because she captures his mouth briefly with her lips that are parted and says, “welcome to Nevada,” with a voice that is deep and low.  She pulls back, buckles her seat belt and puts her glasses back on her face.  She drives off into the desert and Jack thinks he’ll die a pretty happy man.

“How did you know about Frank?”

“General Peters,” Sam answers.

“Oh?”

“He asked for my assessment on the situation… said he’d received a request for General O’Neill’s security detail to have on-site housing during the General’s visit.”

“Oh, god,” Jack wipes a hand down his face.  “Frank said that would be best because the base is closer to your house than the closest hotel.”

“He wanted to know if that meant he’d have to entertain you on base during the holidays and whether I thought his wife Marge should roast a duck or cater food out,” Sam tells him.

Jack wants to laugh but he’s now a little worried about what Sam had to reveal.  Whatever the President had told them years ago, they’d still have to keep any relationship under wraps.

“So, what did you tell him?” he hedges.

“I told him that the former SG1 took turns hosting the General,” she lets go of the wheel for a second to do air quotes with her slender fingers, “for Christmas, and that with Teal’c in Dakara and Daniel on a project on New Athos, that it was my turn to host you and that I had dinner plans already… catered,” she air quotes the last word again.

“He bought that?”

“Yeah, I had said SG1 was a really close team.  I’m sorry if it made you sound a bit… homeless for Christmas, but after that he seemed relieved with the planning and very appreciative of me.  He even gave me an extra two days holiday so I could get ready.”

“Nice.”

“Yeah.  You okay with that?”

“Sam,” he says and waits until she glances at him, “I’m definitely okay with that.”

“Good,” she says and puts a hand open-faced on his seat.  He looks down and smiles at her invitation, his left hand going easily into her right and squeezing it lightly once their hands are clasped.  The puppy shifts and starts licking their joined hands.  Sam laughs and disconnects long enough to pet him, but then is quick to return to her spot on his hand.

Cassie meets them in the driveway and Sam waves at her as she opens the garage for Sam to park.  Sam goes in the house to check on the kids and lets Cassie greet Jack.  Before she closes the door, she catches a glimpse of Jack’s arms full of Cassandra Fraser and her heart swells.  She wants the pair embracing to be a part of her future forever, and she’s anxious and hopeful about how her day will go.

She’s reminding Jenny and Drew about who their guest is and how to behave when the garage door opens.  Jack and Cassie have put the puppy in a medium sized box, a red bow on top.  Jack gets on his knees and speaks to each of her children, talks to them easily, making sure to listen as they speak and answer their questions about his white hair and his shoes that according to Drew, are very cool.  When they turn their attention to the box and Jenny lifts the lid, her squeal is louder than expected, and Drew’s face is a picture of happiness that Sam never expected to see on him again after Pete’s death.  Her anxieties die and the day unfolds in perfect harmony.

After lunch, they pile in Sam’s jeep and Frank follows them to a Pet store.  It’s Christmas eve and there isn’t a soul in the store, so Frank’s job is easy, and he stays away from the family and lets them peruse all the dog isles freely.  At one point, Frank looks down the aisle and sees General O’Neill with the small boy in his arms, showing him the gerbils and pet hamsters in the glass displays that are too tall for the boy’s eye view.  The boy giggles and claps his hands and Frank watches, amazed when his usually hard-faced General smiles widely and rubs the little boys back with affection.  Frank wonders at the relationship and considers for a split second that the kids are his, but then he shakes his head, remembers Carter’s spouse’s death and chastises himself for the thought.  O’Neill puts the boy down when the little girl pulls at his shirt, and he takes her hand and follows her to a large display where a snake is about to eat a grasshopper.  The General gets down on one knee and starts explaining something to the little girl; Frank knows the General isn’t great with his knees, and so he wonders why the man is putting in all the effort with these small people, he knows the up and down is painful for him.  The General turns his gaze and catches a glimpse of Colonel Carter, the puppy in her arms, and she’s picking out a leash for the new pup.  Frank watches his bosses’ expression, sees that the effort with the kids is a product of what’s on his face as he stares at the mother.  The General’s in love, and Frank wonders if the man knows that he’s wearing his emotions on his sleeves.  Frank’s been the General’s weekend man for over a year, and he finally gets it; the scene in front of him, the woman and her kids and the husband that is recently dead.  They are what he’s been waiting for, they are what he wants.

sSsSsSsSsSs

“Sam?  I can’t find my bag,” Jack says, “I left it right by the door… wanted to get some gifts out.”

“I put it in the room, no worries,” Sam tells him, chopping vegetables on the kitchen counter. 

“Oh.  Which room?” he asks.

She stops her chopping and looks up at him.  “My room.”  She thinks it’s cute that he had any doubt where he’d be sleeping.  They’ve been talking daily, quite intimately, and his question endears him to her even more.

He stares back at her.  She thinks he still looks confused so she repeats.  “I put your bag in my room, Jack.  The last bedroom on the left side of the hallway,” she says calmly and watches him finally connect the pieces.

She smiles and goes back to her chopping until she feels his hands skim her arms and come up from behind her to stop her movements.  She turns in his arms and he captures her mouth in a deep, sweet kiss.  She melts into the kiss and her hands skim up the sides of his arms, one landing on his bicep, the other threading easily into the hair at the nape of his neck.  They pull back long enough to adjust the placement of their noses and when they meet again, their mouths are open and they both moan into the kitchen.  Jack pushes her deeper into the counter and he sneaks a hand under her sweater, spays his hand on the soft, warm skin of her back.  She has to break the kiss at the sensation of his hands on her bare skin, and with her eyes still closed, she tilts her head back to enjoy the pleasure of his bare hands and of his lips that are traveling down her neck.  His hand moves up, skims the line of her bra and then goes back down, his fingers bridging the barrier of her pants and skimming the soft skin of her lower back.  Her eyes pop open when he touches the top skin of her ass cheek, and she guides his head back up, holds it so their lips are almost touching again.  His eyes are closed so she whispers,

“Jack.”

He opens his eyes and she sees two black orbs, his pupils so dilated she can’t tell where it ends. 

“Sam,” he says in a voice so husky it causes Sam to have to shift her pose.  Slowly, she moves her head and with her lips near his ear, whispers that she loves him, that she always has, for as long as she can remember.

He doesn’t move, waiting to see if she still has something more to reveal, but she lowers her face to his neck and so he gathers her up, intensely, and hugs her, pulling his hands back out of her clothing and using them to gather her tightly in his arms.

“I love you too, Samantha Carter.  Always.”

The embrace lasts, and there is no reason to ever separate again.

sSsSsSsSsSs

When Cassie comes in after her outing at the movies it’s only ten o’clock and Sam and Jack are in the living room on the couch.  When they hear the door open, Sam is straddling Jack over the couch and her shirt is up above her chest, Jack’s mouth around a lace-covered nipple.  Cassie walks into the living room in time to see Sam stretching her shirt down and Jack place a couch cushion over his lap.  She stops walking because she notices they are both red and have lips that are swollen.  Sam’s hair is a mess and Jack’s is sticking up in odd places.

“Finally,” Cassie says, her lack of tact evidence of her age and upbringing among too many mothers.  “Though, you guys should really get a room…”

“Cassandra,” Jack says warningly.

“Sorry, Jack.  Just want you guys to be happy.”

“Cassie,” Sam says, but the girl is gone.  Sam takes a moment to calm her beating heart, admires the presents that her and Jack had arranged for all three kids under the tree.  The puppy is sprawled on its new bed, something Jack had bought during the afternoon family outing to the pet store.  “I’ll go talk to her,” she says finally.

“Sam…”

“Just give me five minutes,” she stands and goes over to him, leans in and kisses him.  “I promise I’ll be right back.”

He squeezes her hip for good measure.

Sam knocks on her room and walks in.  Cassie looks at her oddly.  “What are you doing here, Sam?  Get out there!”

“You’re being a bit sassy about all this, Cassie,” Sam closes the door.  “Are you sure you’re not uncomfortable about us sharing a room?”

“Sam,” Cassie poses her features in her best no-nonsense face. 

Sam walks to Cassie’s bed and falls into it.  Cassie walks over and says, “That good, huh?”

At the comment, Sam comes back up almost immediately to sit up.  She puts her hands on her cheeks and smiles.  “I’m so happy, Cassie.”  The young girl quickly comes over and sits next to Sam.  “I can’t stop smiling.”

Cassie looks confused.  “Sam… I was just joking when I walked in… are you telling me this is all new? That… that in all this time you guys have never been together?”

Sam doesn’t answer for a moment.  She takes a deep breath and decides how to answer the girl who can’t possibly understand why her and Jack would have exercised restraint.  “It’s not that Jack and I have never… we’ve never,” she looks around the room.  “Cassie, we’ve never been able to hold hands, or sit next to each other at dinner, or casually kiss in the kitchen.  We’ve never touched each other’s hair or told each other our dreams or—”

“Or had a late-night make-out session on the couch.”

“Yep,” Sam nods.

“I get it, Sam,” Cassie says.  “You’ve been in love forever, though.”

Sam nods but doesn’t speak.

“So... can you, uh, keep the puppy in your room tonight?”

Cassie stands up.  “For sure.”

“It’s a puppy, so it’ll probably cry in the middle of the night and need to go out.”

“Of course, no problem.”

“You understand why, right, Cassie?”

Cassie grimaces.  “Ugh, Sam… all the sex.”

Sam nods.  “Right.  And you’re old enough to know that this…” she looks up and wants to speak to Cassie as a woman, “that sex changes a relationship.” She doesn’t want to go as far as telling Cassie that she suspects, considering their past experience, that the sex with Jack will be beyond phenomenal and that once they cross that line, it will be hard, she coughs, difficult to stop.  She touches her cheeks again and isn’t surprised she’s blushing.

Cassie just stares at her and shakes her head, obviously amused.  “You’ve got it bad, Sam.”

It’s been almost seven years since Janet died, seven years that Sam’s been acting as a pseudo-mother to Cassie, seven years that she’s been loving this kid as if she were her own flesh and blood.  “Yeah,” she says to Cassandra, “yeah, I do.  But finally… finally, Cassie, I know exactly what I want.”

They move closer together and Cassie hugs her.

“I love you,” Cassie says.

“I love you too, Cass.”

“Knock him dead, Sam,” Cassie says as she pulls back, Sam in a fit of giggles.

sSsSsSsSs

The tree had been trimmed, the presents wrapped and placed just so under the twinkling tree.  Andrew’s new bike had been built and was sitting near the tree near Jenny’s new scooter, the presents for Cassie wrapped in gold and adorned with royal purple ribbon.  The kitchen was clean, the dry ingredients for pancakes laid out in a bowl, and all the Advent candles had been blown out before bed.

Sam locks up the house and walks slowly through, checking one last time on the kids, now sleeping in a room together down the hall.  Nearing the guest room, she sees light streaming underneath the door and hears Cassie laughing, a phone conversation underway while some sort of movie plays in the background. 

“Goodnight, Cass,” she calls out.

Cassie opens the door, in shorts and a t-shirt, and still holding the phone to her ear, comes close to kiss Sam on the cheek.  “G’night, Sam.  Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas, Sweetheart,” Sam kisses her back, and then without another glance, Cassie disappears into her room and closes the door.

Sam smiles and walks down to her room, a slight nervous twinge in her belly.  There is a soft glow coming through the open doorway, and when she steps in she sees Jack digging through his suitcase, opened on her bedroom floor.

“Hey there,” she announces her presence.

“Hi,” he says without turning around.  He finds his toiletry bag, pulls it out, “I just need to…” points to her en-suite bathroom, the lights already on.

“Of course,” she says and tries for calm, but her heart is beating in her chest and he turns and goes in, leaves the door open and she can hear him begin to brush his teeth.  She turns and swallows, closes her eyes and wills the butterflies that are throwing a disco party in her belly to calm themselves.  She opens her eyes and sees her bed, pristinely made with its pillows piled on top.  She frowns because this isn’t exactly how she’d imagined it would happen.  She doesn’t quite have one single clear picture of it, but she had imagined couches, hotel beds, the backs of doors in various locations.  She shakes her head to clear the sudden smut and throws the decorative pillows off the bed and pulls down the comforter a bit, turns the top sheet over it on her side and then walks around the huge bed to go to the other side.  She knows they’re going to have sex, and she thinks about how it will look if Jack comes back in and sees the bed prepped for sex, but then she shrugs and starts rolling the comforter and sheets down toward the foot to the bed.  The king-sized bed is too wide to do it all at once, so she has to stop and walk to the other side and accomplish the job in increments.  She’s about to have to walk over again when Jack shows up on the opposite side of the bed and understanding what she’s doing, starts working with her on his side.  In seconds, the bed is spread clean, its top sheet and comforter rolled up perfectly on the foot of the bed, ready to be drawn over bodies once they are ready for sleep.  She’s not surprised he can read her and work with her without words.  She can’t wait to see what else they can accomplish without voicing a single command. 

He looks down and seems unsure about himself, so she tells him she’s going to brush her teeth too and goes into the bathroom.  If he’s got fresh, minty breath, she doesn’t want to be the one still tasting of Christmas eve dinner.  When she comes back out, the door to the bedroom is locked and Jack has his socks and his shirt off.  He turns and faces her and she has to stop dead in her tracks.  The sight of his bare chest causes her pulse to quicken and her limbs to shiver.  Jack notices and he comes closer; when he touches her, she has to lower her eyes and it causes her skin to tingle and her blood to grown warmer still.

“You’re sure you’re ready?” he asks her, his left hand twitching at his side as his right hand grazes her hand.  “I won’t be able to stop once I start.”

She lifts her head and stares at his eyes.  Her look of hunger produces a deep sound in his throat that makes her wet instantly.  She brings a hand up to his chest and looks down at it, follows her hands as they touch, trace his hairs, touch his nipples, splay on his rock-hard abs.  “I don’t want you to ever stop, Jack,” she says, not believing that the low, husky sound she’s hearing is her voice.

His mouth lands on hers, no longer soft like in the car, like in the kitchen.  It’s hard and rough.  It’s akin to their kissing years ago, outside O’Malley’s or at her house.  She remembers, and she responds.  As much as he pushes and pries she gives and massages back, the smacking of their lips reverberating in the otherwise quiet room.  Together, they lift her shirt up and over her head and it lands on a heap near her feet.  Jack’s face is hunger and arousal and need, and hers is all serene, a type of surrender that is pure and whole.  He admires her in her lace, lifts a hand to cup a breast, round and full, and she hums when his thumb brushes over her taut nipple.  His mouth descends on her neck and she feels him shift when her hand skims the bulge of his jeans.  She repeats her action and is pleased when instead of jerking away, he presses his pelvis into her hand and finds her mouth again for a languid kiss, slow and sensuous.  He starts undoing her jeans, but before he slides them down her legs she whispers, “The lights…” and he stops, separates from her and turns off the bathroom lights, the room lights, every light he can possibly find.  If she wants it dark, he’s going to oblige her. 

In the pitch dark, he returns to where he was, but she’s not there.  He can’t see much, and he’s about to call out for her when he hears a click and is bathed in a soft light.  Sam is standing near her bed, the soft glow of a bedside lamp bathing her in light, her legs now free of her jeans.  Jack has to swallow at the sight of her, the red lace contrasting her pale skin, the deep areolas of her nipples in view through the lace, a dark patch highlighted in the thin red lace between her thighs.

“Sam,” he breaths out, and he thinks he might be near a heart attack for all the hammering that is going on in his chest.  She’s breathing heavily too, he can tell by the way her breasts are moving.  As she walks toward him, her hands reach behind her back and she undoes the clasp of her bra.  She waits until she’s standing right in front of him to let the piece of lace fall to the ground.  His gasp is audible, and she watches his face as he takes in the sight of her naked breasts.  His hands go up, and with the back of his fingers he moves over her skin, traces the round sides and then grazes her nipples, causing her eyes to fall shut.  He’s inanely pleased to see freckles.

“You’re perfect,” he chokes out, turning his hands to cup her with both hands.  “Beautiful,” he says, moving in to capture her lips once more.  They kiss, in a sloppy and brazen way as Jack massages her breasts, her back, her buttocks.  Sam’s finally able to undo the zipper on his jeans and she pulls back from his lips to lower his clothing.  She’s insanely aroused so she does pants and underwear all in one go, and the parts of him she once felt through clothing spring out, hard and hot, red and ready. 

“God, Jack,” she speaks, not finding any words to describe what she feels at the sight of him. 

He gathers her to him, and when she feels his hard skin on her soft belly she moans in a way that makes Jack’s hardness twitch, and he has to stop kissing her, walks her back to the side of the bed and sits on it, lets her stand between his legs and runs his hands down her hips, taking with them her red underwear.  He looks at her, takes in her shape and her form.  She comes closer between his legs and her hands guide his mouth to her left breast; the pleasure they both get from the action is mind blowing, and Jack switches to the next breast in the event it might get jealous.  When he does this, his hand travels down Sam’s body to her groin, and she helps him by lifting one knee and resting it on the mattress, opening herself up for him.  When his fingers glide through her soaked folds, he has to move his mouth from her nipple on a low groan, and her moan indicates to him that what he’s doing is just fine by her.  He looks down, enjoys the view of what he’s doing.  She does too, and the image of Jack O’Neill fingering her near his strong erection causes even more pressure to add to the fire.  He moves his thumb and she gasps, “there,” and he learns her body, dips his thumb lower and circles her opening until Sam’s head falls back and he can see her left thigh is shaking. 

He moves his hand away, stands and gathers her, kisses her while they both climb atop the bed.  The mattress is extremely soft and they flop down, landing together with a soft laugh.  She scoots her body the right way, further into the bed, and he follows her, cups her face and kisses her long and deep, his hands traveling over her body and setting her on fire.  Sam does the same, and when she finally has a full hand around him, he curses and breaks the kiss, forces her hand away with a grunt.  She understands and she waits, watches him concentrate and will his body to slow down.  She likes watching him, likes his shape and the hairs that are both dark and gray near his stiff and throbbing limb, notices the way his testicles are tight and firm and she has to fist her hands to keep herself from cupping them. 

She forgets about the looking because his mouth is back on her breast and his middle finger slips through her in a way it hadn’t yet.  He moves slowly, the pad of his finger grazing her labia and then circling the uppermost pleasure point, the place Jack seems to have already memorized, then dipping down, further down, until his middle finger slips in, slips deep, and Sam has to “Oh,” audibly and tighten her grip on the back of his neck.  He repeats his action over and over again, and soon he stays nearer the top, circling and moving and finding a rhythm that has Sam calling his name and moving her pelvis off the mattress and into his hands.  Jack thinks she must be close; he’s noticed how swollen and thick her skin has become, but he’s not sure, doesn’t know her tells yet.  She tries again to touch him, to signal that she wants him and not his hands for this, but he continues restlessly, until she bucks off the bed and cries his name and then he knows that she has come, knows from her face that it’s extreme pleasure that she feels.  He keeps stroking her, albeit slower, but she takes his arm and pulls him straight across her chest and on top of her, takes his seeping erection in her hands and guides it to her opening until he needs no further help.  He looks down at her and meets her eyes.  They are clouded with release, but she meets his gaze.  She nods and he pushes in, slowly, and all in one move he’s inside of her.  He has to close his eyes and she moans, and he can feel her body contracting from her orgasm.  It had been a while for her, he knows, and she’s tight around him in a way that makes him crazy.  Being inside Sam Carter isn’t like anything he’s felt his whole life. 

“Wow,” he says, and she strokes his back.  He pulls out, again slowly, and when he pushes in this time, Sam’s sound isn’t like before; it’s louder and full of pleasure and it causes Jack to go mad.  He continues, the movements steady, and he moans with her when she pulls her legs up and it changes the depth and angle of their game. 

“This feels so good,” he says, and Sam’s a little surprised he’s a talker.  She can’t exactly find words at the moment but she tries.

“Yes,” she says.  It’s more of a moan but she gives herself a gold star for the effort and then closes her eyes again when he picks up his pace. 

“You feel incredible to me,” he continues, and damn if that doesn’t spur her on.  She didn’t think she could come again so soon in the night, but his words and the moment and Jack O’Neill inside of her might be enough.

“Jack,” she says, and he pushes into her, the heat at the point of entry overwhelming and the feeling of him and her and the knowing that it is finally him with her has Sam reeling with anticipation.  The moment is a long time coming, the feeling of him with her is a desire of years gone and past.  Sam’s going to come again, and the coil is gathering, building pressure, the beat drumming faster still.

“Harder,” she gets out, and Jack moves with unlimited resolve, giving her all he’s got, and the coil bursts, the waves of pleasure unwinding.  She uses her muscles to pull him down with her, and he grunts long and low, his pelvis as far up into her as it can possibly go, and then he thrusts again, her name on his lips each time he does until he stills, pushes again deep into her and waits, enjoys the feeling of her body contracting around him, his body spent and empty inside of her. 

“Oh, god,” she says, hugging him tightly and enjoying the drunk feeling of contentment that come from the high they’ve just had.

Jack’s quiet, and he tries to roll off of her but she tightens her arms around him, won’t let him move.   “Stay,” she says.  “Not yet.”

“I love you, Sam,” Jack kisses her.

“I love you too,” she mouths between kisses. 

After a minute, Sam’s hands loosen around him and Jack slides out of her and slips to the side, Sam turning with him so they are facing each other.  She watches his breathing calm and traces the beads of sweat on his chest. 

“If we had done this years ago…” she starts out.

“Don’t go there, Sam.”

“I’m serious,” she tries.

“If we had done this years ago, I would have quit the Air Force, kidnapped you, and forced you to live at the cabin and do this with me every hour, on the hour.”

She smiles and moves to rest her head closer to his chest.  “Can you do it every hour on the hour?”  He laughs and kisses the top of her head.  “Sounds like a great way to go.”

“We knew it would be good,” he says, “after everything that went on, we knew it had to be good.”

“This wasn’t good, Jack,” she moves her head to look at him.  “This was… I can’t describe how good it was.”

“I know,” he nods.  “It’s because we’re in love.  We’ve been in love for a long time,” he says matter of fact, skimming his hands on her rib cage.  He tells her what he thinks of each detail of her anatomy, describes what it felt like to be inside of her, the pleasure he received from her body.  She’s blushing by the time he finishes and she can’t believe this man of few words can be so verbose about the ways he loves her. 

After a long while of talking, she pushes him over and teaches him that she likes sex in twos, that his body brings her plenty of pleasure as well, that an hour is enough recovery time for both of them, at least tonight.  She tells him she doesn’t think every hour on the hour is feasible, what with their jobs and her family life, but she suggests morning and night and Jack tells her that she’s going to be the death of him.  He talks again during sex and Sam can’t believe her ears at the things he says and how much they arouse her.  She toys with him until he’s incoherent, then lets him loose on her again, and she tells him she won’t be able to walk the next day.  He says he doesn’t mind carrying her everywhere and that makes Sam grin.  They have to move to the other side of the bed to sleep to avoid the wet spots, and they laugh about the size of the bed, Jack jokes that he won’t be able to find her in it in the morning.  They promise each other to always share a small bed so their bodies can be as near each other as possible.  Sam gets up to unlock the door and leave it ajar, and they both don on pajamas in the event a child were to need Sam during the night.  They fall asleep on their sides facing each other, their heads on the same pillow, their hands clasped between them, the clean sheets and comforter they had rolled up together covering them up.

In the end, having sex for the first time in a well-made, comfortable bed, after brushing teeth and locking up the house wasn’t as daring or sexy as her imaginations had come up with, but, just like her life, it turned out the alternative to be the way that worked best for her.  Tomorrow was Christmas, a day to celebrate the promise of new life, of family, of gift sharing, of joy.  For Jack and Sam, a new door was opening, the winds of change blowing it wide open, the promises of purpose and fulfillment adorning it like a wreath.


	28. The Right One

Jack’s cell phone rings sometime in the night and he jumps away from his spot spooning behind Sam on the bed to find it.  She shifts but stays in bed, and he flips the phone open and goes into the bathroom, closes the door behind him.  He’s sitting on her bathroom counter and speaking into his phone when Sam comes through the door, squinting at the bright light.  He mouths “sorry” as she walks by and she disappears into the separate toilet room, closes the door. 

“But Reynolds authorized the mission, so he had to have some confidence they’d find her,” Jack says as he watches her emerge again, the toilet flushing.  She washes her hands then goes toward him, hugs him on the counter and whispers in his ears, “Trouble?”

“SG-12, MIA,” he whispers back.

She kisses him on the neck and leaves the bathroom, wondering if she knows anybody on SG-12.  It’s after five in the morning, so she sneaks into Cassie’s room and grabs the sleeping puppy off its bed on the floor.  It licks her hand when she pets it and Sam talks to it as she makes the coffee and sets the machine to brew.  She takes the Puppy out and helps it find a patch a grass that is suitable, waits an interminable amount of time for the pup to finally go.  She peeks in on the kids and they’re both asleep; Drew sprawled sideways on his bed, and Jenny cuddling her Mickey doll close to her face.  She makes it back in to her room and closes the door and she can hear Jack in the shower.  Without thought, she puts the puppy on her bed, makes a square with pillows so it can’t fall out, and watches as it snuggles in deep and falls asleep.  She sheds her pajamas and walks to the bathroom, opens the glass shower door and joins him.  Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

They behave like civilized adults in the shower, washing hair and shaving legs, but they do their share of looking.  Jack explains that Captain Hailey fell down a valley of some sort during the last Naquadah extraction expedition, that Reynolds had sent SG-12 to rescue her, and that now everyone was MIA and that Hank needed his take on the next step.  Sam listens, gives her opinion and asks him why the hell they haven’t replaced Reynolds yet.  Jack tells her that it’s Hank’s prerogative, and she tells him it might be her first order of business when she takes over.  Hank shouldn’t be having to make these types of calls; Reynolds should be doing his job well in the first place.

When they get out and dry off, Jack picks her up and walks her to the bed, sees the sleeping puppy and lays Sam down farther away.  He spreads her legs and spreads her labia, and the first stroke of his tongue causes her to tell him that this way of waking up is better than coffee.  He licks and sucks on her sensitive skin, strokes her with his mouth and fingers and takes his time, tells her to prolong her pleasure, that there is no hurry and that he’s not going anywhere.  The moment and the feeling and the physicality of his mouth on her for the first time makes it impossible to prolong it, and before she completely falls apart, he lifts his face from her to tell her that he’d always wanted to cause her to orgasm against his face.  With the next touch, she’s gone, transported momentarily to a different galaxy, her hand fisting at his hair.  After he licks her clean, he climbs up her body and kisses her, and Sam tastes herself on the man she loves.  He enters her and is quick, the previous activity arousing him beyond cognition.  When he finishes, he can’t stop shaking, and Sam rolls them over and covers him with a blanket, their bodies still partially wet from the shower.

“Did you sleep well?” she whispers to him, his eyes closed.  They’ve had at least four good hours, and she can’t remember sleeping so soundly in years.

“Yeah.  I didn’t dream,” he tells her.  “Slept like a baby,” his arms are around her middle and he can’t stop touching her skin; she feels incredible to him, and when he moves his tongue over his teeth, he relishes the taste that lingers in his mouth; honey and Sam Carter, all in one.

“Do you usually dream?”

Jack opens his eyes.  She looks so serene, her wet hair framing her face and spread everywhere on the white sheets.  She’s beautiful, has always been, but Jack thinks she’s gotten better with age, like a good bottle of scotch or fine barrel of wine.  Her eyelashes are so full, so luscious, he wonders momentarily if they’re real.  She’s everything he’s ever wanted, and he wants to tell her everything that’s important to him.  “I dream about making sandwiches,” he begins and watches her furrow her eyebrows.  “I dream about them all night… hours and hours, I make sandwiches, one after the other.  When I wake up I feel like it was real, like I actually made them, like I haven’t slept at all.  I’ve even searched my kitchen and trash in case I had gone wacko and was sleepwalking and actually doing it… but no… they’re dreams,” he licks his lips and keeps rubbing her hip at a spot he’s found he particularly likes.  “I make sandwiches all night long… and when I wake up, I’m exhausted.”

Sam makes a sound of acknowledgement, moves her left hand over his arm.

“I’ve been to a couple of people, even found that the Pentagon has a psychotherapist on staff, did you know that?”

“No,” Sam answers, interested.

“She couldn’t figure it out, anyway.  Told me I’m under too much stress,” Jack makes a face.  “Show me anyone at the Pentagon who isn’t under too much stress.”

“I’m sorry,” she leans in to kiss his chest.  “That must be horrible.”

“But look at tonight… no dream.  I just need to make sure to keep you in my bed and I’ll be safe,” he says, and even though she laughs into his chest, he’s not exactly joking.

“Merry Christmas,” Sam whispers and lifts her head up to kiss him.

“Merry Christmas, Samantha,” Jack says to her.  “You have no idea how happy I am.”

“I have some idea.”

“Mmmm.”

The Puppy finally makes its way out of the barricade Sam created for him and walks happily to its owner, its tail wagging.  He walks over Jack and plops himself on Sam’s chest.  She laughs and hugs the puppy back, and Jack tells her the puppy might have been a bad idea, that he’s probably going to be jealous of their private love affair.  Jack reaches over and pets the puppy, moves his hand and grazes the sides of her breasts.  It’s amazing to him that he can do this.  He counts her freckles as he says, “What about Santa’s Little Helper?”

“What?” Sam asks, completely confused.

“For the dog’s name.”

She looks at him, at the dog, and at him again.  “What?” she repeats.

“That’s the dog’s name on the Simpsons.”

She stares at him a moment, trying to see if he’s in earnest, then laughs and swats him.

“It was worth a shot… it’s Christmas after all.”

“Do they really call it that… Santa’s Little Helper… all the time?”

“Yep,” Jack says smiling.  “It’s such a great show!”

Sam smiles too and enjoys the way Jack is, relaxed and real.  She runs her fingernails through his chest hair and remembers the last pet she had, a cat named Schrodinger, and she rolls her eyes at the name and the phase of life she must have been in.   “What if we named it ‘Bart?’”  she suggests, out of nowhere.

Jack lifts his torso and looks down at her.  “Would you really?”

She smiles.  She thinks about the name, the character, thinks it might be time for a little irreverence, a little rebellion, a little fun.  “Yeah.  I like that.  It would make me think of you.”

“Hot damn!” He leans down to run his lips down her neck, and they kiss a while longer, Jack pushing Bart to the side to enjoy his blond-turned-brunette, her hair wet and sticking to her face.

sSsSsSsSs

There is wrapping paper everywhere.  It’s not just the kids and Cassie and their elation at Christmas morning, it’s Bart, who has discovered the crinkly paper and the ribbons and the way he is able to rip and play with the tissue paper that has the living room floor completely covered.  Jack’s on the floor with Drew, building new sections of the train set he’s received from Santa Claus, while Sam and Jenny sit on the couch, Sam teaching Jenny different games on a Gameboy-like toy Jack has given her.  On the giant lazy-boy in her pajamas, Cassie is sprawled wide, adding contacts to her new cell phone, Sam’s gift to her for Christmas.  When Sam gets up to cook breakfast, Jack tells her to wait, that there is one more present under the tree.  He hands her a small gift-wrapped box, and tells her, “Merry Christmas, Sam,” in a voice that she likes.

“You already got me the dog, Jack.”

The kids ignore them and pile on the couch to watch t.v., and Sam sits on the floor near him to open her gift. 

“I bought this for you a long time ago…”

“Really?” she asks, nervously, casting the paper away.  It’s a jewelry box and although she knows something he doesn’t, she still feels knots beneath her chest.  Bart charges and steals the small square of gift-wrap and starts flinging in back in forth, his small barks filling the room. 

They laugh at the dog, and Sam opens the box and sees a necklace, a thin chain with a round pendant.  “Oh, Jack,” she says.  She brings it closer to her face.  The pendant is round and flat and dainty.  In its center, the letter “J” sits indented.  It’s not exactly noticeable from far away, but she loves the detail in it, its simplicity, it’s style.  “How long ago?” she asks as she takes it out of the box.  She’s wondering how long he’s had jewelry purchased for her with his initial on it.

“Years.”

She looks up, fits the necklace around her neck.  “Before Pete?”

He shakes his head.  “I bought it for you after Jenny was born, as a Christmas present.  The ‘J’ is for her name, not mine.  When she was born, your world changed, and I know how much value the kids bring to you,” he shifts, coughs.  “But then, things got complicated… I never gave it to you,” he sits up and touches the pendant, traces the small J with his fingernail.  “I wanted you to have it now.” 

“I love it,” she says, reaching up and placing her hand over his.  “But I have Drew now too… he’s bound to get jealous about me not wearing an ‘A.’”

Jack frowns, he doesn’t think the three-year-old cares.  The necklace looks perfect on her, resting on her clavicle and making her neckline sexy and enticing. 

“So maybe the ‘J’ can be for ‘Jack,’” she surprises him by saying,

They stare at each other and he smiles.  “I’d be okay with that, I guess.”

She smiles back, and turns to see the three kids on the couch watching a show. 

Jack tells her the story of when he bought it, tells her he bought a different necklace for Cassie that day too.  While he’s still talking, about the metal in the necklace and the lady who sold him the jewel all those years ago, she gets up and goes under the tree, fetches a small box similar to his and brings it toward him.  “Open it,” she tells him as she hands him the small box, and he does as he’s told, a glint in his eyes.

When he pops the top of the small box off, he freezes, because the item inside isn’t anything he was expecting.  He looks up at her, his brows furrowed in confusion, the question on his mind asking her what in holy Hannah’s name is this.

She sits in front of him, in his space, and her hand reaches in and takes out the single ring that is inside.  It’s silver looking but Sam knows that it’s tungsten and exotic, and it’s shaped exactly like what it is, a wedding ring.  It’s not small and dainty because it’s not meant for her, it’s meant for _him_.  It’s thick, and large enough to fit his finger, and it’s his in a way he can’t comprehend.

She holds it up with her small digits and fingers it between her thumb and index finger.  “You know,” she tells him.  “I thought this would be awkward, and strange, and really, really cheesy.  I thought it would be ridiculous, and way too rushed, and a million other things.  But I don’t feel that way right now,” she tells him as she pulls his left hand out and opens his palms.  She looks at his hand as she speaks, “Yesterday and today has confirmed, this is the right decision.” She tears her eyes from his hands and looks at him.  “My heart has been yours, Jack O’Neill.  It’s been yours for a long time, forever, really.  You’re it.  You’re the right one.”  She licks her lips and takes action, watches his face as he watches the ring now laid peacefully in his palm.  “I want you to have it – my heart – it’s yours,” she says, “it always has been.”

She pulls her hand back and waits, sees his face and the crinckles that remain on his brow.

“Oh,” she adds.  “And I hope you’ll wear this someday,” she touches the ring again in his palm.  It’s not just a symbol of her heart, it’s a question too, it’s exactly the kind of question that comes with a ring.  “I know our situation is still complicated, and not just with work… but you said you’d still want me, even with the kids, so,” she continues, mumbling now.  “I don’t know what that means now, until the Air Force isn’t an issue, but after… uh, last night,” she takes her voice down to a whisper.  “I think sharing a room would be nice, and… I hope you’ll wear it soon.”  She licks her lips, “I’ve been unsure most of my life, and fickle as hell with you, and this is… this is a promise.  I’m not going to change my mind.”

Jack stares down at his palm for an interminable amount of time.  Finally, with his right hand, he reaches down and picks it up, holds it in his right hand and looks at her.  “Sam?”

“Mmm?”

“Did you just ask me to—”

“Yeah, I did.”  She’s not unsure, she’s not hesitating.  There is a confidence in her answer and it makes Jack’s heart want to explode.  “I didn’t buy this years ago… I bought it last week,” she says and gives a nervous laugh, trying to make light of the weight of her purchase.  He doesn’t laugh.

Slowly, she sobers and lifts her gaze from the ring and looks at him, sticks her chin out and smiles, a gesture that is heavy, he watches her swallow and realizes that as nervous as she is to take this chance, he’s not nervous at all to give her an answer, and he leans in and drags his hand on the curve of her chin, traces her mouth with his thumb.

“Yes,” he says, his lips touching hers.  “I’ll have your heart, and your hand, and your life.  And I hope you’ll take mine too.”  He adds pressure to her lips and kisses her.  Sam snakes her arm around his neck, but he pulls back, remembering to add that he’ll cherish her kids too, that he already loves them, that he’ll find it a privilege to help her raise them, that it would be a gift to him that they would be his own.  He chokes on the last part, and looks up to see Sam’s eyes full to the brim.  She blinks and her face streaks wet.

“Oh, my God!”

Sam and Jack turn, their faces still touching, and see Cassandra Frazer, on the edge of her seat, her hand over her mouth and her face red and excited.   “I can’t believe this!”  she manages to say.  She’s very near tears and Sam and Jack adjust their bodies to include the girl.

“Cass,” Sam gets out, gesturing for the girl.

Cassie gets off the couch and embraces Sam, mumbles in Sam’s ear, “I’m so proud of you, Sam.  This makes me so happy.”  She pulls back and looks at Jack too.  “This makes me so, so happy!”

Jack all but grabs her and crushes her in a strong embrace.  “You know that we’re not your mom and dad, and we won’t pretend to ever be, but I hope that you’ll think of this as your family, that you’ll always come to us, that we’re the place you think of as home.”

Cassie nods into him, and Sam is the first to tell Cassie that for a while things have to stay unofficial, unchanged, but Cassie interrupts her.

“You’re wrong, Sam.  This is a big change.  This is the best change – official or not.  I haven’t been in a real, big family in such a long time.” The girl thinks for a moment, her head bowed.  They all smile at her until she adds.  “Can I have my own room in D.C.?  This is really going to save time guys, one visit and I’ll get to see everyone at once!”

Cassie’s thinking logistics but Sam’s still introspective.  She’s had a family life, lived in a house with a husband and kids and it wasn’t what she’d expected, didn’t find the satisfaction she craved.  She doesn’t know if it’ll be any easier with Jack, but she thinks the well of affection and love she has for him is bound to help.

That night, when they make love, she pours herself into him.  She’s wanted him for years and she finally has him.  She tells him that she had been stagnant, that she had succumb to the inertia of losing and allowed her dreams, her desires to wither.  She speaks of the awakening of the things that are inside of her, of the potential outside of her and of the power of her choice.  She tells him that each time she sees her reality expanding she wants a little more.  Her heart is expanding with his presence, her capacity to love expanding with each breath she takes.  She’s finally taken the right door – she knows because it feels real, and alive, and when she peeks through the door she can see glimpses of a future bright with hope.  Penny’s been telling Sam more about spirituality, about listening to her heart, about learning herself, about following the things that bring meaning to her life, that make sense to her world.  She realizes that it’s not just Jack and what he means to her, but it’s what Jack fosters in her, what he brings out of her, the way she can be and act when he’s in her life.  She hears Jack mumble in his sleep, and she thinks he says something about mayonnaise.  She breathes deeply and holds his hand under the sheets, runs her thumb on the skin of his hands until he calms.  Wherever she goes in life from here on, she knows she wants this man by her side.  It’s a monumental spiritual moment, and the peace that descends in the room breaks the dream and Sam drifts off too, the love of her life by her side, his hand in hers.


	29. Washington, D.C.

On the phone one day, Jack casually asks if she’ll join him for an event he has to go to in Washington, D.C.  Sam has to look at schools and at houses and she finds the opportunity to be ideal.  She allows herself the truth that she also needs to see Jack, needs to be held again, to have him nuzzle her neck and for her to tell him she loves him more than life.  She finds she can’t stop saying it now that she’s said it, and she hears the emotion in his voice when he hears it too.  She’s been in love with him for a while, but this feels different.  It’s old love but it feels new, exciting, addicting.   She can’t wait to be in his bed again, her body yearns for him each night.  There are evenings on the phone where they both want to act, narrate, exhale into the speaker, but they refrain; he’s a General in the Air Force and they both know the line is probably tapped by several agencies. 

She flies in and goes to his house to get into her dress and she knows he won’t be there.  He’s wearing dress blues tonight anyway, and he’s told her his plan to change shirts before he leaves for the night.  He’s picking her up at his own house forty-five minutes before the event starts.  At 1820, the doorbell rings and it’s Frank, a black SUV parked behind him.

“Frank, hi!”

“Good evening, Colonel Carter.  General O’Neill apologizes Ma’am, but he’s stuck in a meeting and asked that I go ahead and pick you up first so that you both won’t be late for tonight’s event,” Frank says, apologetically.

“Of course, Frank, no problem.  I’ll just get my coat,” Sam answers, disappearing into the house.   Frank’s a good man, and he’d never make Jack feel uncomfortable by saying anything, but he thinks to himself that perhaps O’Neill better take a blood thinner tonight.  Colonel Carter’s dress reveals everything about her physical features that Frank thinks O’Neill appreciates.  He knows a little of the woman inside too, her personality and her way of being, and he thinks the combination of the woman within and the woman who can pull off that dress will be Jack O’Neill’s undoing.  Frank also feels some relief knowing the General and the Colonel are in some type of relationship; his orders for tonight about their bags and General staying at the hotel are crystal clear.

They drive to the Pentagon and idle near a back door until they see Jack rush to the car and get in.

“I’m so sorry about that,” he prefaces, “I wanted to be there to pick you up.” 

“It’s alright,” she says, and as soon as the door is shut, he leans in and kisses her.

“You look beautiful,” he tells her, noticing her makeup, her hair, the eyelashes that seem darker and longer each time he sees her.

“You look pretty good yourself,” she answers.  She’s never been with him in his Class A’s and been able to have him later, too. 

“Thanks.  Did you bring a bag like I said?”

“Yeah, in the back.”  Jack had told her he was booking a night at a hotel near their event, that it would be easier that way, and that she should bring a change of clothes for the night.  “Frank will check us in and deliver our bags there while we’re playing politics with all the Washington wigs.”

“Where are we going, anyway?”

“National Harbor, annual ambassador’s dinner, the President’s dropping in at some point.”

They arrive at the Harbor and the driver drops them off at a circle drive-way, a red carpet laid out and a line of fanfare and reporters laid before them in the receiving line.  Frank goes ahead of them as they pass through and go to check their coats.  When Jack helps Sam out of her evening coat, he curses as he watches her turn around to face him.

“God Almighty, Carter,” he whispers to her as he lays her coat on the desk and takes his own off.  “You should have warned me.”  Her dress is a floor-length black piece and Jack has to shift, cough, and turn towards the counter for a moment in the guise of getting his ticket.  She smiles wickedly at him and watches him adjust himself under the counter.  He takes a few deep breaths, thanks the clerk and turns to her again.  The straps of her black dress have little glittery things, like diamonds, he thinks, and the neckline ends somewhere well below her breast line.  He can see both breasts partially outlined, their shape round and perfect, and the most stunning part to him is the patch of pale skin between and below her breasts, flat and toned.  He has to lick his lips as he remembers that the back of the dress is non-existent, save for the flowy skirt that ends past her glittering shoes.  He’s never known her to show skin in public, and when he stops to watch her face, he sees the pleasure she is getting from his reaction.

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

She smiles again.  “I don’t know what you mean, General,” she says coyly.

He places a hand on the small of her back and walks near her as he speaks lowly.  “That’s exactly what a mean… rendering a four-star General powerless,” he pauses to look her in the eyes.  “Right now, Carter, you have control over my every sense.”

“I don’t want your senses,” she says, calmly, “just your heart.”

They’re in public and he can’t kiss her, can’t even hold her hand or squeeze her skin near her back, so he winks at her and she winks back, and together they walk into the ballroom, dignitaries and diplomats waiting to shake their hands.

They’re at the head table with the President, but he’s not there, won’t be there but for a few moments during the evening, so they chat with the other important people and their spouses, Admiral Wallace, the White House Chief of Staff and the ambassador to Denmark, whose new assignment has landed him at the President’s table.  The food is good, lobster salad, filet of sole, mushroom risotto, and two more dishes Sam can’t even touch.  Jack eats all of it, though, and when he steals her dessert, the ambassador’s wife eyes him wearily.  Sam’s had two glasses of wine but isn’t surprised Jack’s had none.  He’s in uniform and even though the dinner is a place where it’d be socially acceptable to have a drink, he tells her he doesn’t trust himself to drink in public with her dressed _like that._

When the President arrives, the whole room stands and he gives a speech, and then walks over to the head table to congratulate the new ambassador to Denmark.  He catches a glimpse of Sam and does a double take, turns and smiles at his Air Force Chief of Staff and winks for good measure.  Jack laughs and shakes his head.  The President’s wife asks the new ambassador for a dance, and the President walks toward the ambassador’s wife.  The woman apologizes and reveals her foot, explains a recent surgery and shows off her medical boot.  The President smiles awkwardly and looks at Mrs. Wallace, who blanches at the thought and shakes her head. 

“Colonel Carter,” the President turns to her, “perhaps you’d help your Commander-in-Chief out.”

“I’d be happy to, Mister President,” she answers, stepping up to the President.

Jack watches from the table as Carter dances effortlessly with the President of the United States.  Jack knows Hayes will be leaving after this dance, so when he hears the end of the song approach, he stands and takes the President’s place at Carter’s side.  Hayes thanks him for making the exit look more natural and then he’s gone.  Jack stands with Carter in the center of the ballroom and the music starts back up; the only acceptable thing to do is to keep dancing, so they do.

Later, when a few people start to slip out, Sam leans in and whispers to Jack, asks him how far the hotel is where they are spending the night.  He reaches into his pocket and takes out a flat key-card, lays it on her lap and whispers back, “Room 3006, this hotel.”

Sam smiles and tucks the room key into her clutch, and then looks around.  She locates a sign on the wall labeling the place and realizes they’re in the ballroom of the Gaylord National Resort on the Harbor.  She’d always admired the hotel during her years in D.C., and so she stands and greets the few people she’s conversed with the most, makes her way through the doors and disappears.  Jack waits fifteen minutes, schmoozes with a few dignitaries, and then does the same. 

When Jack opens the door to room 3006, he sees the room, a king-sized bed, their luggage delivered and placed to the side, and Samantha Carter in her evening gown, standing before the ceiling-to-floor window, the National Harbor outlining her body.  He closes the door and she turns.

“This view is stunning, Jack.”

“It is,” he answers, but he doesn’t mean the Harbor.  He goes toward her.  “You looked fantastic tonight.  You _look_ good enough to eat.  Carter, you are… amazing in that dress.”

She smiles and ducks her head in an unusual show of shyness.  He walks to her and lifts her chin with his hand and forces her eyes to meet his.  “I’ve missed you so much.”

She closes her eyes and nods, takes a deep breath and says, “I missed you too… so much.”

The first touch of their lips is soft, but only for a moment.  Jack’s fire has been burning all night and he is out of control when it comes to his passion for her.  She responds in kind, and her hand goes immediately to cup him, modesty and timing be damned.  Their tongues collide and they moan at one another, clutching at each other in want and desperate need.  He walks her backwards to the bed and lets her flop down, meets her there to kiss and fondler her as he pleases.  He takes liberties, doing things in her mouth with his tongue and others down south with his hands that he’s never done with her before. 

“Can you keep the dress on?” he says hoarsely, not caring how needy he sounds or how immature the request may be.  The outfit has become a part of her to him, and when he palms her breast under the dress and makes her moan, he thinks she doesn’t mind his reaction to her wearing it.

He has his mouth around her left nipple when she lowers the zipper on his pants.  He pulls back and looks down on her, sees her red face and her eyes that are hazy.  Her left breast is exposed but her right one is still tucked behind the dress.  The fabric for the skirt is bunched at her waist and his right hand is at her crotch.  He’s moved her panties out of the way and is fingering her swollen flesh.  He pauses once he takes stock of her, sees that she’s still trying to get his whole package out of his pants.  When he shifts to get out of his jacket, she stops him.

“No,” she shakes her head, breathing hard.  “Keep it on… please.”  Her eyes are on fire and Jack is turned on all over again just to know that she wants him in his dress blues.  She props herself up enough to lower his zipper all the way.  She maneuvers his underwear and his pants and then suddenly frees him, erect and glistening, everything tight and firm, his sex the only part of his body that can be seen through his uniform.  Even his belt is still buckled around his waist.

He pushes her back down onto the bed and his mouth goes back to her nipple, his fingers go all the way into her and she cries out at the feeling.  Her hand skims him and then grasps him, and they play this game together, their hands pleasuring each other, fully clothed, fully aroused.  They keep the game up until Sam stops touching him, moves her arms above her head and grasps the headboard. 

“Jack, I’m close,” she tells him. 

He removes his fingers from her and then positions himself at her entrance, “Wait for me, Sam,” he asks her and then plunges forward.

She moans into the room and when he pulls back out, she has the courage to utter the words, “Sir, yes, Sir.”

Jack goes mad at her words, uttering his own groan of pleasure, and without holding back pumps into her over and over, the room filling with the back and forth slaps of skin-on-skin, their moans of pleasure, the sounds of their clothing rubbing against the other. 

“General…” Sam moans, and the title makes him falter his rhythm.  Sam notices and pulls her legs up and around his uniform pants, forcing his hips further into her with her feet that are still clad in heels.  He recovers and moves his hand, crushes his thumb on top of her pleasure point as he keeps pumping, watches her face when she can’t wait for him any longer.  He speeds up, and as he feels her muscles pulling him in, he buries his face in the crook of her neck and spends himself off inside of her, his release filling her as her moisture spills down and around her bottom, wetting the back of her black dress.

They stay that way, breathing hard and feeling the contractions in and of each other, basking in the closeness they feel.

“You, Madam, will be the death of me,” he whispers in her ear as he kisses her.

“I’m happy to oblige, Sir,” she answers in a sleepy voice.

“You okay?”

“Very,” she says, “very okay.”

He lays a chaste kiss on her lips and pulls out of her slowly, is careful getting up, and he helps her up as well, apologizing for her dress.

“I don’t care about the dress, Jack.” 

He sees her standing, one breast still outside of the black material, and he gently tugs it into place.  “I do care about the dress.  It’s become my favorite dress, in fact,” he tells her.  She turns around and he unzips her at her waist, and he watches and she steps out of the dress altogether, removes the black thong and throws both pieces into a pile on the corner of the room.  She turns around, naked now, and starts unbuttoning his jacket, and she helps him remove piece by piece, until together they are laid bare.  She picks up his dog tags and removes it, looks closer and sees that his ring is hanging on the chain with his tags, the ring she gave him, the one that promises to Jack that she’s his.  She fingers it on the chain, and after she lays the chain on the dresser, they rinse off in the shower.

She stands near the giant window again, her body wrapped in a towel.  “You know, I’m ready for that dessert I didn’t eat.”

He can read her pretty well and he’s already getting his jeans out of the case.  “Let’s take a walk,” he says.  “There used to be a Ben and Jerry’s food truck on the little pier and I could go for some Cherry Garcia myself.”  He locates his cell phone and calls Frank, tells him their plans.  Frank tells him it shouldn’t be a problem, that with the event including a presidential visit, and dignitaries everywhere, the area had been completely swept and secured. 

They walk out of the hotel hand in hand, inconspicuous now, in jeans and winter coats, and Frank walking ten steps ahead.  It’s a clear February night, the air is crisp, and there are couples and families walking together, touring the Harbor, there are children sliding down the leg of the Awakening statue, and Jack gets a cone with two scoops of Cherry Garcia and Sam a bowl of Chunky Monkey.  They walk to the end of the pier and they sit and watch the giant ferris wheel and eat their frozen treats.  When they finish, they stay and talk, Sam tells him her plans for Monday, she’s seeing four schools and two preschools, and then brings up the real estate agent that’s taking her to look at properties on Sunday morning.

He’s quiet after she mentions housing, and so she keeps going, “I’m going to look at Alexandria and Annandale.  The Pentagon rep said the best schools are in that area.”

Jack nods.  “Are you seeing anything in Vienna?” he asks. 

Sam looks at him and then back at the water, puffs air through her cheeks and shakes her head.  She knows his house is in Vienna.  They’re both quiet because neither knows how to proceed in this conversation.  Jack lets go of her hand and digs in his jacket pocket.  Sam watches as he pulls an item out and holds it in his closed fist.  Slowly, he opens it and she sees his tungsten ring in the palm of his hand.  On top of it, is a smaller ring.  It’s thin but it has small diamonds that cover the surface of the entire ring, and it glitters from the light of the lightpole behind them.

Sam holds her breath and he takes the ring meant for him and puts it on, takes the ring meant for her and pulls her left hand toward him, slides the ring all the way up her finger and then admires the shimmering diamonds on her hand.  They aren’t big and flashy, but they are a sign of how rare, beautiful and priceless she is to him.  “I thought you needed one too… to remember that this isn’t going away.”

“It’s beautiful, Jack.  I love it,” she uses her thumb to turn the ring around in her finger, admiring the unending string of diamonds and the way they make her feel. 

“Can I come with you?” he says nervously, “to look at houses?”

“Yeah,” she says, “of course.”

“How many bedrooms did you tell the agent?”

“Three,” Sam says, “I want Jenny to have her own room.”

“What about Cass?” Jack asks, leaning in closer when he feels her shiver from the cold.

“I can’t afford a four bedroom, Jack.  Not in the areas I mentioned.”

“You can’t alone, but we can together,” he tells her.

She looks up at him.  “I’m not…” she shakes her head and sits up a bit.  “I’m not after you for your money.”

“I didn’t think you were… I’m not saying this to offend you.  But if we’re doing this,” he touches her ring and moves it around her finger, “then we should consider getting a house that will fit all of us so that you don’t have to move the kids again.”

She sits back into the seat, into him, and nods.  She rests her head on his shoulder and enjoys his nearness.  They talk more, and Sam asks Jack the things she still needs to know, about Charlie and Jack’s desire to be a parent again, what he really thinks of her kids, about Sarah O’Neill and what communication they still have, about how many times a year he thinks they can make it out to the cabin.  He has plenty of questions for her too, asks more about her marriage with Pete because there are some things he wants to know; he still feels anguished not knowing about the years they had of silence.  She tells him everything, can pinpoint the exact moment the marriage ended, tells him the sordid details she’s never told a soul.  When they stop talking, they feel more connected than they ever have before.  They go back to the hotel room and this time when Sam strips, she climbs atop the bed and gets on all fours, waits for Jack to follow her.  When he sees her position, he curses under his breath and climbs behind her, takes her hard and fast, his hands holding on tightly to her hips, his mouth moving up and down her bare back.

When their bodies fall on the bed together, Jack holds her tightly and tells her again that he loves her.  Sam tells her she likes Washington, D.C. after all, that she can’t wait to move here, that maybe they can just live in this hotel.  When he laughs, the hairs on his chest rub against her back and Sam smiles, delighted with the feel of him.


	30. Walk Through It

In the end, the school Sam likes best is closer to Vienna than Alexandria and she buys a four-bedroom house that happens to be a seven minute walk to Jack’s own home.  The house is perfect, the large master bedroom has a balcony and Jack tells her he can even rig a telescope there when he moves in one day.  She shrugs at the telescope idea and suggests a love seat instead, the kind that you can stretch your legs out on and has a cup holder for their beer.  In that instant, Jack remembers why he loves the woman.  Below the house, there’s a basement that already features a tool bench and Sam finds herself signing the offer before she even sees two other houses on the realtor’s schedule.  It turns out her salary as a General affords the house just fine, and she doesn’t even have to touch the money from Pete’s life insurance.  She takes the sum and invests it for Jenny and Drew.  She lets Jack pay for the backyard remodel, and he adds a deck and a grill for him, a swing for Drew, and a wooden playhouse for Jenny. 

It takes a full year after Sam’s been made a General for Jack’s last commission to run out.  The President begs, again, but Jack stands firm and Hayes knows he can’t keep the man through the second term he’s just won in the White House.  He’s also willing to let him go because Jack hedges that after a long vacation, he might be willing to come back as a civilian in some kind of role.  Sam’s transformed the Stargate program, encouraged openness about information with elected officials and, in turn, been given a great deal more funding.  As promised, her first order of business was to reassign Cam Mitchell to the post of SGC Commander, and with Sam’s leadership, Cam’s focused the SGC’s manpower on exploration, Naquadah mining, and the strengthening of relationships with alien allies.  She’s kept Rodney McKay as chief scientist on Atlantis and he’s happy there, he and Jennifer have a pair of kids and New Athos is safe enough that they live well, even away from Earth.  Daniel splits his time between Atlantis and mapping out the new cultures Cam Mitchell finds through the Stargate.  Sam’s brought in Zelenka to Area 51 to run the science department.  Radek had made the choice to immigrate to the U.S. and following his naturalization vows, he committed himself fully to the understanding and backward engineering of alien technology.  Sam assigned John Sheppard to test and oversee the development of Earth’s defense spaceships, a role he thrives in.  Besides the Hammond and the Destiny, Sam has personally mapped out two more vessels that are in construction, she’s named one the Janet Fraser, while the other takes the name The Enterprise.  The committee making decisions on the ship had suggested naming it after Teal’c, who, in turn, said a more prestigious name would be The Enterprise.  The committee was reluctant at first, claiming it might be confusing considering the same name for the navy aircraft carried.  They all settle when Jack O’Neill steps in and suggests The Enterprise T.   The ship’s namesake remains well in Dakara and with six grandchildren, he only manages to visit Earth once a year for Sam’s birthday.

The wedding happens the day after Jack’s retirement party, and the private ceremony takes place in their own home, the living room filled with their best and closest friends.  Sam flies Penny in from Nevada, and the nun dons a white stole when she stands and gives the couple a blessing after the vows have been spoken.  The night of the wedding Jack has a dream and he makes one sandwich, only one, and it’s a huge concoction with ham, salami, cheese, bacon… everything he likes.  After he makes it, in the dream, he sits on the kitchen counter and eats it, all of it, until the huge sandwich is gone.  He licks his fingers and climbs off the counter, walks back to bed in the dream… though he’s in his bed already, snuggled behind his bride.  When they wake up Jack tells Sam what happened, that he made just one sandwich in this dream but that he also ate it, the whole thing.  They go to the cabin for their honeymoon, alone.  They’ve been to the cabin together during the summer with the children, but never just the two of them.  They still have crazy, passionate sex and they’re convinced it will never change, never grow old.  The wedding rings on their fingers brings another dimension to their life.  They’ve been wearing them on their dog tags for over a year and now they can wear them on their fingers, display them proudly.  They don’t want to take them off even when Sam is due back at work.  Jack finds he has very little left at his own house, he’s been practically living at Sam’s all year long, but he sells his house and moves in all the way, and the first time Drew calls him ‘Dad’ makes Jack cry though he doesn’t let the kid see it.  Sam gives him a wedding present, another Bouvier, a female called Lisa, and Jack never dreams about sandwiches again.

A year after that and Cam Mitchell calls Sam at home, after hours, to get her opinion on something; the Nox have contacted the SGC with a problem.  A small aircraft has crashed on the Nox planet, the craft destroyed and its two pilots dead, a man and a woman, but there is a living being in the escape pod, safe from harm.  The Nox woman brings the baby through the stargate and explains to Mitchell that according to the technology of the aircraft, the Nox believe the baby should be raised by humans from Earth, that the Tau’ri are the best choice, in their opinion, to provide the child with a similar upbringing to its own culture.  Sam listens even as she stares at a picture of the little girl on her email attachment.  She looks to be about 18-months-old and has dark brown hair and dark brown eyes and she looks small and lost.  Sam looks behind her and Jack is standing lazily by the doorway to their room, listening to Sam’s phone conversation and watching as Sam stares at the picture of the little girl on the computer.  He walks to her desk, scribbles something on a notepad in front of her, and once she reads it, she looks up at him and smiles.  Sam tells Cam what to do and when she hangs up, she and Jack go into the attic to find the pack-n-play that is stored somewhere with the Christmas decorations. 

It’s the middle of the night when an airman drops the child off at their house and Sam tells Jack that it’s only for the weekend, that her contacts are working, seeing if any Air Force personnel with clearance are looking to adopt.  The girl attaches herself to Jack instantly, and on the third day, when Jack walks in on Sam rocking the girl to sleep, he meets her gaze and nods, the decision made.  The girl doesn’t speak yet but babbles plenty, and she says the word “bev” repeatedly, so they name her Beverly, after Jack’s mom.  She follows Drew around constantly and he doesn’t mind, loves showing her his toys and teaching her how to attach the tracks together on his speed racer set.  The night the adoption papers are finalized, Jack makes love to Sam repeatedly, telling her that Bev is their child together, that their family is finally complete.  When Cassie graduates veterinary school, she moves to Virginia to be near her family, and in a few short years is able to open her own clinic, and she and her boyfriend live in the apartments above the clinic in Alexandria. 

They all live near D.C. now and there are too many cemeteries that they cannot visit – Charlie’s, Janet’s, Sam’s parents, and yes, even Pete’s.  Sam used to have hate in her heart but now the hate has mellowed.  She also doesn’t cast blame anymore, not on herself for her choices, not on others either.  She’s learned to accept her life, feels grateful each day for its direction.  There’s a community center in Vienna not far from their home and it features a healing garden in the back, greens, purples and yellows planted year-round.  They go there from time to time when they still need to mourn, to feel, to remember, but they never stay long.  There’s too much to live for now, too much to see.  Sam realizes that her path, though it’s had bumps and dangerous curves, is still hers, that she’s been able to write her own story and find herself in the crumbling pieces of every difficult situation.  She finds it monumental on her 50th birthday when she tells Teal’c that she thinks life’s been worth living, that she’d do it all over again, that she can’t wait for the next 50 no matter what they might bring.  Indeed, she can only see light in her future, only hope and happiness.  She’s a woman redeemed, a woman who has found the right door, and finally walked through it.

The End.

**Many thanks to the readers, to MF for my always beta, and to my many encouragers while writing this.  This chapter is for S, who IS getting married, and for N, whose enthusiasm for updates is contagious.**

**Doors is a fanfiction work by webbo.  Penny, Jenny, Drew, Bev, and any other original characters are property of webbo.  All other characters are owned by MGM from StargateSG1 and used here for fun.  No copyright infringement is intended.  Do not translate or audio this fic.**

**“Ask and it will be given to you.  Seek and you will find.**

**Knock, and the _door_ will be opened to you.”**

**Jesus, Matthew 7:7**


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